The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (54 page)

Audrey was a stocky, thick-limbed girl in her twenties, though she was nowhere near as fat as her father. She had a lot of tattoos on her biceps and a round, pretty face. She spoke quickly and cuttingly in a sharp, nasal voice, and her eyes spent a lot of time sardonically rolling around in her head. She tended the bar at Artie’s and let Leon drink for free if her boss—Artie himself—was not present, though she hinted that Artie tacitly suspected this and did not much mind. It was clear that Audrey loved her father, but in the world-wise and resigned way in which children who are more mature than their parents sometimes do; that is, they may choose to love them honestly and deeply even though their love is darkened somewhat by the resentment that
their parents’ irresponsibility by necessity pushed them too early into taking care of themselves; but she loved him, anyway. Leon ordered more beer, and then it was late and I was drunk, the restaurant was empty and the houselights had come on, and we had to go. The next day we began to rehearse our performances of Shakespeare.

When I met him Leon Smoler was a great and brilliant and unpromising and utter failure. He’d spent a lifetime perfecting failure almost to an art form. He had failed at many arts. He was a failed director, a failed actor, a failed writer, a failed musician, a failed photographer, a failed housepainter, a failed gravedigger, a failed commercial fisherman, a failed substitute high school teacher, a Princeton University dropout, an avowed alcoholic, a dishonorably discharged veteran, and a three-time divorcé. A Renaissance man, a jack-of-all-trades, and a master of few. He was fifty years old when I met him. He’d thus far spent his life pinging around like a pinball from one elaborate catastrophe to the next. He had once directed an off-off-Broadway production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
performed entirely in the nude. He lived in Los Angeles for a while, working as a set painter. Life in Hollywood fizzled out and he moved back to New York, where he founded a theatre company to produce his own plays, which he wrote in accordance with Artaud’s manifesto on the Theatre of Cruelty. This feat of entrepreneurial derring-do also ended in ignominious bankruptcy. He had played Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Shylock, Brutus, Falstaff. He had been stabbed to death many times over, as Polonius, as Claudius, as Banquo, as Julius Caesar. Somewhere in all that Leon got married and divorced three times, though none of these marriages lasted more than a few years. He has two grown children from different marriages, Audrey and Oliver (both named after Shakespearean characters), to whom he was a permissive and incompetent father.
Oliver lived far away and seldom saw his father, whom he resented, but Audrey lived nearby with her girlfriend and worked behind the bar at Artie’s. On that particular day in March when I met him, he had been busking Shakespearean monologues on the subway because he had recently been sacked (for insubordination) from his job as a bus driver. Following his sacking he had liberated the Henry VIII costume from the dressing room of a theatre company to which he still had an illegally copied key, and went to work.

“It was not stealing, because it is impossible to ‘steal’ a possession unneeded by its possessor,” he said. “They could not possibly have needed it, because it would never have fit anyone but me. I played Henry VIII in a spectacularly wretched production of that deservedly underproduced play a year or two ago. The costume was designed to my specifics and would never fit another human being. Therefore, by virtue of my physiognomy, it is rightfully mine.” He invented a name for his one-man theatre company—the Shakespeare Underground—and took to the trains, riding them all day, yo-yoing up and down along the length of Manhattan and undulating back and forth across the breadth of it, walking from one train compartment to the next, shaking his coffee can and allowing his lungs to be inflated with and his soul to be possessed by the words of Falstaff, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Shylock, Prospero, reciting whatever speeches came to mind in whatever order in which they came, a revolving cast of kings, princes, sorcerers, moneylenders, and madmen, lovers and the beloved, traitors and the betrayed, murderers and the murdered, haunting the reeking and rattling underground trains with Shakespeare’s ghost.

So far he’d made seventy-eight dollars: a sum which, while by no means lavish, was not to be sneezed at. He said he’d been doing it for six days.

Soon after we met, I became an inspiration to Leon. He saw great potential in me. I put an idea into his mind, an idea that would
later blossom into the magnum opus of both his career and mine: to stage an epic production of
The Tempest
. It would be a spectacle that would weave together his two passions: Shakespeare and magic. It would star Leon as Prospero and Bruno Littlemore as Caliban.

“This idea took form in my mind from the very moment I first saw you,” Leon would say much later. “The roots of this idea took hold, the green sapling began reaching out of the soil into the sunlight, and this great idea slowly began to develop into a reality.” When he divulged his plan to me, we had already been giving performances of Shakespeare in the subway together for some time. For obvious reasons, the circuslike spectacle of a monstrously fat man playing opposite a clean-shaven and verbally conversant chimpanzee more than quintupled the average hourly income of the Shakespeare Underground, which now boasted two members.

At first we performed in the subway cars, as Leon had been doing before we met. I would ride like a child on his massive shoulders as he walked down the aisle, rattling the coffee can. This was because it was infeasible to perform any other way in the tight confines of the subway car. Great fun, it was. I would always have to duck to fit under the door as we passed from one car to the next, clinging to Leon’s head with my long purple hands during that terrifying moment of darkness and thunder, stinking hot air and blasting wind between car and car. I stretched out my long arms to grab hold of the poles and the loops of strap in passing, and this also helped to steady Leon’s balance. For sheer amusement we continued to play certain scenes in this way—me sitting on Leon’s shoulders and flailing my long arms high in the air—even after we switched to performing on the floors of the stations. Because after the first couple of weeks we soon found it more advantageous to perform in the subway stations: for financial reasons (higher traffic, bigger audiences), pragmatic reasons (more freedom in terms of staging), and because (as we were at one point somewhat rudely informed by an officer of the NYPD)
performing inside the cars while they are in transit is, in fact, illegal. So after that we typically set up shop in the terminal beneath Grand Central Station—that giant, palatial building whose ceiling, ornamented with a golden map of the nighttime heavens, had so dazzled me upon my near-accidental arrival in New York—where the floors are wide and the pedestrian traffic is always bustling, and if we got bored of performing there we would relocate to the Forty-second Street or the Union Square stations.

Leon’s favorite character to play was Falstaff, and he had the physique for the role, so I would oblige him with my Prince Hal. He would lie on a bedroll on the filthy tiled floor of the station, pretending to sleep (which looked plausible enough), and I would stroll by, notice him, and rouse him with a gentle kick. Falstaff half-sits up, and, yawning, stretching, snorting, rubbing his eyes, says: “Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?”

And I retort, “Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou has forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of day?” And so on. We would do any scene that called for a dialogue between two characters, though we gravitated toward comic scenes, and our tragic scenes for some reason had a way of becoming comic when we performed them. I was Horatio to his absurdly obese Hamlet, I was Cassius to his Brutus, I was Iago to his Othello, Antonio to his Shylock, and I wore a blond wig, lipstick, and a dress to play the Juliet to his Romeo (authentic Shakespearean women are performed in drag anyway), the Cordelia to his Lear, and I was the Lady to his Macbeth, riding triumphantly on the shoulders of my husband as I chastise him for his weakness of heart and exhort him to murder, and now I realize, Gwen, that I’ve gotten ahead of myself and completely neglected to tell you about my nose.

A
h, my nose! My anthropomorphosis was not complete yet. Let’s talk about noses, Gwen. Look at a chimpanzee’s nose. No human being who isn’t grotesquely deformed has a nose like that. It’s barely there at all. The chimp’s face caves inward in the middle like a wad of punched-in dough. The gentle glacis of his lower face into his wide upper lip from his nose holes, these two ugly apertures are flanged with a couple of slight ridges between the eyes, and that is all a chimp has to call his nose. I felt that I could not even begin to convincingly pass for human with an abhorrence like that smack in the middle of my otherwise not entirely unhandsome face. No, that thing had to go. Or rather, it had to
become
: to become a real man’s nose.

I do not remember at what point I had begun to obsess so much over my nose, but it was before I was accidentally removed to New York, and before I was living with Leon and performing Shakespeare in the subways. But I do know that this was when my vanity finally drove me to rhinoplasty. I was so self-conscious of my nose’s ugliness that I swear I couldn’t go five minutes without thinking about it. I scrutinized my face in every reflective surface I happened to pass, imagining what it would look like with a decently attractive
human nose. Noses are strange things, Gwen. There is something innately humorous about them. Noses are silly. While the eyes are the tragedians of the face, the nose is its comedian. The eyes are the windows to the soul: human beings are disturbed and enchanted by their eyes—and amused by their noses.

Anyway, I wanted one. I had to have a nose. I’d made my decision, but there were difficulties. Chief among them: I was illegal. I was off the grid. I had no Social Security number, paid no taxes, had no papers of any kind to prove my existence, outside of some documents moldering in a filing cabinet somewhere in the Lincoln Park Zoo—but they were of course no help to me, not for what I wanted. The Shakespeare Underground was beginning to pull in a decent (but far from exorbitant) amount of cash by this time, due almost certainly to the addition of Bruno to the company, to the freak-show element he added to the act, and so also was the case with Leon’s magic shows. In truth, Leon had never been scrabbling in so much business in a very long time as he was with me. He came to depend on me—he needed me. Like organ grinder and monkey, we were entertainment symbiotes, lowbrow wedded to high. Months passed quietly. Leon and I passed these months in performing Shakespeare in the subway stations, rehearsing our acts in Leon’s squalid apartment on City Island, and occasionally performing our magic shows. Leon made me a present of my beautiful nickel-plated kazoo, and I learned to play it. As I’ve said, I have it still. Sometime I will show you my kazoo, Gwen. Leon would cook spaghetti for us, or instant macaroni and cheese, and we would eat watching old movies on TV—watching Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Cary Grant. We spent many nights at Artie’s, drinking for free at Audrey’s tolerant behest. We became great friends.

Between Shakespeare, magic, and the bar beneath the rubber shark in the back of Artie’s Shrimp Shanty, the months passed, and our finances increased at a modest rate. But I was still a fugitive,
and I was still in hiding. During these months, I dared not try to return to Chicago to come back to Lydia, although she was never far from my thoughts. I too much feared what would have become of me. Of course I wondered—bitterly, I wondered—if it had been Tal who had sold me out to the biomedical research lab. I shuddered to think it. I could not believe this seriously, though. I was sure that forces beyond her control—and far beyond Lydia’s—had resulted in my forced removal to New York, and my attempted enslavement. I was on my own. What could I have done? Where could someone in my situation have gone? There seemed but two options: science or entertainment. I could have gone crawling back to science, if it was certain slavery with the benefits of security and relative comfort I had wanted, and of course I did not want that. So instead I went into show business. And I liked it. I liked to regale an audience with my clacking teeth and hideous form, I enjoyed the attention, I loved to act, and I loved to scramble around in the audience riling up all the shrieking children with hat in hand and kazoo in mouth, while Leon’s skilled magician’s hands twisted and bent matter into wild manifestations of apparent magic.

I mentioned to Leon that I wanted a new nose. At first he balked.

“Why in the blighted world would you want to beautify that gloriously revolting face of yours?” he said between a gulp of beer and a belch. “Nature has obviously intended you for a life in entertainment! That face is your golden goose! Don’t butcher it!”