The Voiceover Artist (10 page)

“Y— you think that s— s— silence gives a st— st— stuttering m— man a fort to hi— hide in. Y— you think it m— makes you s— strong.” I shook my head. “It doesn't. N— not f— for long.”

I checked his face then. He must have felt my eyes on him, because he looked up and met them for just a second. For the first time in months, he didn't seem to hate me.

“I've tried s— silence,” I said. “L— like y— you're trying it n— now. A— and I've l— learned two th— things. Woo— whether you sss— say a lot or a l— little, it— it's b— better to be able t— to talk, e— even how we— we do it. And si— si— silence is day—dangerous. You use y— your voice o— or you l— lose it.” I shook my head and waved off that last part. “Y— your s— s— stutter t— takes it away.”

I felt Simon stiffen in the spine, which told me he'd never considered losing his voice for good, and that now he was worried that maybe I knew what the hell I was talking about.

I turned my head to him, brushing my chin against the top of my shoulder, and when our eyes met that time, I was reminded of a truth Simon well understood, and I did my best to forget: Simon's stutter was my fault. He was how he was because I didn't have any better to give him. That's why Connor is such a miracle! He came from me, just like Simon did. Connor is proof that there's something in me that doesn't hack words to pieces.

“Y— you nee— need to s— s— start s— speaking again, Simon,” I said. “Or— or your s— s— stutter w— w—”

I wrapped my hands around an invisible neck.

“—will throttle you and it w— won't let go.”

When I looked at Simon again, he was calm. He pointed at me, and then tapped the flat part of his fist to his chest. I recognized the second gesture as one of the bastardized signs May had taught him, holding the line on Simon's manners even as he stayed silent. The gesture usually meant,
I'm sorry.
But Simon had pointed at me first. He wanted me to apologize.

I saw an opportunity there.

“T— tell me wha— what you w— want m— me to do.”

I nodded at him slowly and even smiled a little. I wanted him to know that I was ready to make amends—and I was, whether I'd done wrong or not. All Simon had to do was open his mouth and tell me to.

But he just stared at me, insisting with those stubborn blue eyes of his:
Apologize
.

“S— say the wor— words,” I said.

In my own mind, I'd already broken Simon's silence and delivered him to my tired but lovely wife. I was already the hero Artie had said I'd never be. I wanted this.

“Say the w— words, Simon.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head.

No.
And I think I also saw,
You first.

Something snapped in me then. I swatted the radio out of Simon's hands, and he dove after it like a lifeguard after a sinking toddler. Without a word.

And less than a month later, when his mother tried to scare him into screaming only to find that the stutter had snuffed out his voice, just like I'd said it would, Simon blamed me. He couldn't say so, but I'm sure of it.

I've taken no joy in Simon's silence, but it has been the occasion of my only real achievement as his father: I have never once looked my son in his hateful eyes and said,
I told you so.

 

•••

 

CONNOR LIVES IN
 Chicago now. He's doing comedy every night, he says. In the past year, I've seen him once, for a Thanksgiving dinner that wasn't much of one: rotisserie chicken from the grocery and a carton of mashed potatoes Simon had brought home from the restaurant the night before. Connor did what May would have done during the meal—he asked Simon if his work at the restaurant was going well and if the commercials he'd been hearing lately were any good. Simon answered with head nods and shrugs. A little while later, I asked Connor how things were going for him with the comedy. He said they were fine, considering he hadn't been in Chicago long.

“W— what are y— your sh— shows like?”

Connor winced a little. “They're hard to explain,” he said. “We improvise, so every show is different.”

I got the idea I'd asked an ignorant question and felt my embarrassment as a pulsing pain.

“How's work for you?” he asked me.

“S— same.”

We were all silent after that. We ate our food and missed May. When we were finished, Simon went to his room, and Connor and I went into the living room to watch a football game neither one of us could gin up much interest in.

Late in the third quarter, with the score tied at seventeen, Connor was slumped down on the couch, his eyes barely open. He was tired, I figured, from all those late nights, but he looked more bored than tired. Half-drunk by then, I started to worry that each minute Connor wasn't entertained pushed his next visit, which was already too far off for my liking if it wasn't next week, further into the future.

“A— anything you— you'd r— rather watch instead?”

He glanced at me—I think he might have thought I was being smart with him, but he must have seen I wasn't.

“It's Thanksgiving,” he said over a yawn, as if it was nonsense that we'd let anything other than football bore us that day.

I would have watched anything he wanted. I just wanted him around.

As I followed Connor out to his car the next morning, I worked up the guts to say that I hoped to see more of him.

“What about coming up to the city, Dad?” Connor said. “You could stay at my place.”

“I— I appre— appreciate the offer,” I said, “but I— I've got n— no interest in d— driving in that city.”

He laughed at me. “Most of the drive is highway.”

“It's n— not a hi— highway if y— you're s— stuck in traffic.” I shook my head. “N— no, thank you.”

Connor nodded with his lower jaw jutted out, measuring my readiness for what he would say next.

“I've got to tell you, Dad. I don't think I'm going to be coming down here very often.”

I knew this, of course, but hearing it still stung. “Be— because of your sh— shows,” I said.

“That's part of it.”

I felt myself getting sore. “W— well, what's the r— rest of it, then?”

“Being in this house with you and Simon—it's no vacation. Mom's funeral was more fun.”

Walking back to the house as Connor's car pulled out of the yard, I had an idea: I would throw Simon out. He was a twenty-three-year-old man. He had a job. He wasn't paying any rent. I could have most of his stuff out of his bedroom and under a tarp in the yard by the time he got home from work. I wasn't about to let the son who hated me keep me from seeing the son who loved me as much as anyone could.

I stood in the living room, glancing at Simon's bedroom door, and imagined calling Connor to tell him the news:
Simon is out for good! Come on down whenever you can. We'll have the place to ourselves!

Only then did I realize that Connor's line about being in the house with Simon and me—that wasn't an explanation for the long stretches between his visits. It was an excuse. Watching ballgames with me was what it had been for Connor since he was eight years old: an easy chore, made harder now by the travel it required. Standing in my living room, I felt like a fool for supposing that throwing Simon out of the house would bring Connor back more than a couple nights a year. Connor was gone—I don't know why I couldn't get that idea fixed in my head. He'd been on his way out since he was a boy.

And Simon was still here. I shit you not when I tell you that, just minutes after I'd planned to evict him, I took comfort in the fact that later that night, when he'd wiped the spots off of the glasses at the Tippecanoe restaurant, Simon would come home. There was a closeness in being the only two people who knew why he'd gone silent, the kind of closeness that might exist between two witnesses to a crime who agree, for their own selfish reasons, not to report it and never to speak to one another again. That closeness had left us with a photo negative of the relationship we might have pictured for ourselves. But it was better than nothing. No, I didn't want Simon out of the house for good. I didn't want to be alone.

So five or six nights a week, I leave for the Four Corners while Simon is still at work. I say hello to the fellas, but I sit by myself at the bar. My drinking buddies are the sports announcers on that little TV in the corner. When I yell at the screen, I yell to them, and if they see the same thing I saw, I let myself believe that they heard me. And some nights, when the game is over and the bar is quiet, I am back in the Four Corners as it was on the day Artie went after Simon. My blood is up. My stutter is closing its hand around my throat. And in my head, where memory and imagination and whiskey meet and mix, I do more than keep my seat. I stand up and, struggling my way through the words and ignoring his interruptions, I tell Artie that he can't talk to my son that way.

And Artie says,
Oh, no?

And he gets up, and his buddies get up, and I get one good punch in, one solid right hand that I grind into the pulp and bone of his nose, before I'm knocked to the ground and they're stomping on my head. And then I wake up groggy in a white hospital room, and May is there, and Connor is there, and Simon is there, too, and I am certain, from my first blurry look at him, that I still have my older son's love and respect.

I usually leave the bar some time after midnight. When I pull the truck into the yard, the house is dark. I come in the back door, pull off my boots and walk across the kitchen floor in socks that won't stay up. And if his radio isn't on, I stand outside Simon's bedroom door and listen, like May and I would do when he was a baby. I stay there, sometimes for minutes at a time, teetering a little but otherwise keeping still, until I've heard something—a snore or a breath or the creak of a mattress spring—that reassures me that Simon has once again come home to what little we have left.

 

•••

 

HE IS TRYING
 to speak.

The first time I noticed, a wind-spanked January night a little more than a month after Connor told me he wouldn't be coming home much anymore, I was standing outside Simon's bedroom door with the liquor still whirring in my head, listening but unsure what I was hearing. I thought he was dry heaving, maybe. But now I know that Simon is working a word—maybe just a syllable—over and over again. It was just a tortured, airy letter
F
for a few months, but now, every once in a while, he gets past the
F
, and I can hear a weary croak—a voice—for a split second before the stutter strangles it.

It's a goddamn miracle Simon has any voice at all. But to call it a miracle isn't fair to Simon. He is
working
for it. He picks fight after fight with his stutter, knowing full well he'll lose. It's the sound of him riding out a fit that kills me—the gagging and straining against a tightness that makes a man feel as if his own body is smothering him. And when Simon's fit is over, while my waterworks run and the snot drips over my lips so I don't reveal myself with a sniffle, Simon starts in on the word again.

Now, every night I go to bed knowing one thing for certain: Simon will leave this place. His trying to talk isn't the only reason I know so. I saw him walk out of the house the other morning, well before he was due at the restaurant, with a textbook and a notebook under his arm. Simon is going to school. He graduated high school, so far as I know, and the only college he could reach on foot is the two-year, community outfit a mile down the highway from our place, so I'm guessing that's where he's enrolled. A man content to keep sharing a house with a person he won't speak to doesn't bother with self-improvements. I never have.

If you'd told me a year ago that Simon would speak again, I'd have said you were full of shit. Simon is still a long way from saying even one word, and he'll always have his stutter to contend with, but I'm not fool enough to bet against the boy again. He stayed silent as a seven-year-old, despite people ordering and even begging him to speak. If Simon getting his voice back is a question of will, like giving it up was, how could
anyone
bet against him? The boy doesn't have Connor's gifts, but he's got his mother's determination in spades.

And when he can speak again, he'll leave me here, just like May and Connor did. I bet he leaves without telling me off. Simon decided a long time ago to stop talking to me, and he sticks to his guns. I admire that about him.

5

 

Elaine Vasner

 

A TALENT AGENCY 
as good as mine—and in Chicago in
2010
, there is no agency better—might get two-dozen unsolicited voiceover demos every day. Unless there's an intern sitting around with nothing to do, or an agent as young and hungry as I was when I started, those demos usually get thrown away unheard. Not at Skyline Talent. I listen to every unsolicited demo sent to our office.

Nothing much comes of these private auditions. In more than thirty-five years in the business, I've signed only a handful of artists on the strength of a demo I didn't ask for. These days, once they've had a few minutes of my attention, almost all of the CDs—even demos from operators shrewd enough to direct their padded manila envelopes to “Elaine Vasner, President”—end up where they belong: in the trash.

Most of my day is spent chasing down the money my clients have earned. I talk tough with the ad-agency people until I'm sure they've heard my unspoken threat—I never dull its edge by saying the words—to cut them off from the finest stable of non-celebrity voiceover talent in the English-speaking world if they don't pay in full, and soon. I play the demos after hours, when I'm finally finished hearing and dismissing the excuses of the accounts-payable hacks I have to deal with. The ritual begins when I pull the bottle of vodka from the bottom drawer of my desk and pour four fingers into the lipstick-stained mug I've been using all day for coffee. I open my office window—just a crack in the winter—and light a cigarette. Then I load the first CD into the player I bought years ago at the Walgreen's on the corner, kick back, and listen.

Most of the demos are bad in mundane ways. They feature voices so weak I can hear them cracking after just thirty seconds, or so grating—the accompanying cover letters, usually written by housewives with a computer, a microphone, and too much time on their hands, tend to describe these voices as “unique” or “quirky”—that I have to sit on my hands to keep myself from pressing the stop button. But some of the demos I hear are spectacularly awful. There are the people who record commercials off the radio and try to shout over the professional performance. Some hopefuls write their own scripts, proving only that their chances as copywriters are as dim as their prospects in voiceover.

Other people break into jingles. I hate jingles.

Then there are the impressionists. Not a month goes by that somebody—usually an out-of-touch white guy—doesn't send in a Jell-O Pudding spot as performed by Bill Cosby. Has any woman who does Mae West ever seen a Mae West movie? Most of the impressions I hear make her sound more like Jimmy Cagney. And just how big is the market for fake celebrity endorsements by Christopher Walken? Do people think the
real
Walken is that hard to get? He's in fucking everything!

But the most tragic—and, therefore, the most hilarious—are the people who, God love them, have so completely suppressed their insecurity about a speech impediment that, apparently, they can't hear themselves anymore. How else would you explain a man with the wettest of lisps, and his pick of any brand name in the world, sending me his recording of a spot for Sears? Or the Asian guy, whose
L
's came out as
R
's, choosing a Cadillac commercial? The real gem arrived just a few months ago. A young woman submitted her performance of a sixty-second radio commercial that, the way she did it, took almost a minute and a half. Every third or fourth word took her five or six tries to spit out. This demo I did not throw away. Sometimes, if the delivery of new unsolicited demos is light, I return to the stutterer's demo and try to figure out what the hell I am listening to. It isn't a joke, that's for sure. The performance is earnest as all hell. One night, after one too many vodkas, I found myself getting a little weepy at the girl's determination, the same way you might tear up watching an amputee finish a marathon. There's something compelling about a person who makes a prize of doing what she's set out to do. And that might be what this demo is—a girl who battled a stutter her whole life proving something to herself and honoring the achievement by sending out the recording. I can tell you what it's not: any reason at all for me to sign the girl who made it.

You might think I listen to these demos for the same reason people watch
American Idol
auditions: to feel superior, to enjoy the thought that, as bad as I may be on my worst day, things could be worse—I could be
this
deluded asshole. But the real reason I hold these auditions night after night is more practical: my other options are going home to a man I've never loved, or calling Larry Sellers, and I don't want to do either thing.

 

•••

 

I STARTED AT
 Skyline as an agent's assistant in
1974
. I was right out of high school and only six months removed from telling my parents what my uncle had been doing to me every time he got me alone. The fearless part of me was born that day. Once you've worked up the nerve to tell your mother that her big brother has been putting his prick where it doesn't belong and that you want it to stop—now—no tough-talking ad man can scare you.

I was promoted to junior agent at twenty-one. Jesus, I was young. To build my client list, I went to theaters—everything from The Second City to storefront avant-garde. I would call ahead, drop the name of the agency to get on the list, and spend the show listening for a voice I could use. Most of the time, I heard no bankable voices, but if I did, I'd wait in the bar across the street after the show and, when the cast showed up, chat up the actor I'd taken an interest in. I would say I'd enjoyed the show, whether I had or not, and ask about voiceover representation. Many of the actors I asked already had agents but rarely had work. I would hand over my card no matter what, and my first clients were actors who called me back—months later, in some cases—having decided they'd be better off with me than with the agent they'd had when we met.

When things were slow at the office, I'd ask the receptionist if any tapes had come in over the transom that day. If she hadn't already thrown them away, I'd bring the tapes to the tiny studio in our office and play them. Unsolicited demos were no better then than they are now. In many ways, they were worse, because decent recording equipment was so expensive. I heard many demos that seemed to capture the sound of a person shouting across a large room. And many of the people with the means and good sense to buy an external microphone didn't know how to use one. No sound is more lethal to a voiceover audition than an amplified gust of heavy breathing from the nose.

Larry Sellers' demo tape was different—by which I mean better—than any other I'd heard. As I found out later, Larry had made the recording after hours in a studio, with an engineer pal working the knobs and faders. But the main thing was that voice. It was incredibly rich in its timbre—especially rare in the voice of someone so young—and it seemed to possess a persuasive quality that worked independently of his spoken words. As Larry described the beauty of the landscape of Illinois' Starved Rock, his voice persuaded me—it gently commanded me—to make a pilgrimage to a state park I'd never even considered visiting before.

Larry's letter, too, was different in how credibly it flattered me.

“Ms. Vasner,” the letter said, “I asked a friend in the industry to give me the name of a talent agent who is a rising star. The name he gave me is yours.

“My audition tape is enclosed with this letter. For now, I've sent it only to you. I hope to hear from you soon. Sincerely, Larry Sellers.”

He'd been my client for six years when, over drinks—after a while, anything we did we did over drinks—Larry came clean: there was no “friend in the industry.” Larry had overheard me making my pitch to a member of the Goodman Theatre's cast of Mamet's
A Life in the Theatre
.

“I didn't know who you were,” Larry told me, “but I'd had my eye on you since you walked in.”

“I bet,” I said, pretending not to believe—and not to be a little excited—that Larry had wanted to pick me up the first time he saw me. I'd liked the look of him from the start. He wore his beard closely cropped beneath a thick head of dark brown hair, and he was beefy without being fat. There just seemed to be
plenty
of him. I felt the urge to take him by his massive upper arms and
squeeze
until my hands were exhausted. I've always preferred big men. My uncle was a skinny shit.

“I'd moved over to the bar,” Larry said, “and was about to buy you a drink when the thespians arrived and you sprang on that string bean of a man.”

I laughed. “You mean Charles Garnett. A wonderful actor.”

“He took himself too seriously.”

“Larry, it was business. Did you want him to slip on a banana peel?”

“What I mean is, he took himself too seriously, and didn't take you seriously enough.”

I hadn't felt that way as I made my pitch to Charles Garnett, but as I recalled the exchange now, I could see him looking down his nose at me and holding my card by one corner, as if it might be contaminated with some disease.

“And when you were done with Garnett,” Larry said, “you left. I hadn't said a word to you. So I figured the only thing I could do was get in a studio, make a tape, and send it to you.”

“So this whole voiceover thing was a ploy to get my attention.”

With that, the greatest voiceover artist of his generation lifted his cocktail glass, held it in front of his lips, and said, “Here's hoping it works.”

And I laughed again. Larry was always a flirt, but his flirting wasn't the funny part. What had me laughing was the idea that anything was more important to Larry than his work. So far as I knew, doing voiceover—what Larry described as the wine-like feel of the words in his mouth as he whispered or crooned or bellowed into the microphone—was all he'd ever loved.

But the story he told about our near meeting worked. It got my attention. I decided I didn't want that night to end with a sloppy, drunken kiss on the street after one round too many. I didn't feel right inviting Larry to my place, and he didn't ask me to his, so I suggested we get a room at the Hilton and Towers. As we rode the elevator up to the tenth floor, standing at the back of the car behind two fat, middle-aged conventioneers, Larry put his hand on my ass and gently goosed it. I let my hand drift over his thigh, brushing the head of his cock through his pants with the back of my painted fingernails. If not for the two conventioneers, I would've fucked him right then and there.

Up in the room, I lit a cigarette and let it dangle from my lips as I undressed for him. Larry lay on the bed in his boxer shorts and purred. I came quickly and put all the energy I had left into pleasing Larry. When we'd finished, I wrapped my arms around him and put my ear to his chest, listening to the workings of his incredible voice and delighting in the feel and the sound of him.

After that, we slept together when we were both between dates and when big residual checks came in. We each had little relationships, but our own seemed to exist on another plane. I wasn't threatened by other women, and Larry never asked me about other men. That was what excited me most about Larry: he could give me what I needed without demanding any more of me than I could give.

For two people unsure if they could ever love anyone more than they loved their work, and because I wasn't sure I could ever trust any man after what my bastard uncle did to me, my relationship with Larry was a perfectly blended, forget-your-cares cocktail: equal parts business and pleasure.

 

•••

 

IN DECEMBER OF
 '
95
, when we'd been working together for eighteen years, Larry called and asked me to meet him at Miller's Pub after work.

Larry and I were regulars at Miller's. Before or after dinner somewhere else, we'd sit at the far end of the bar, away from the hard-drinking Loop lawyers and accountants, sharing our evening only with each other and James, the bartender who'd worked evenings at Miller's since the mid-Seventies, when Larry started drinking there. James put rounds in front of us until it was clear we'd had enough. At another place, we might've demanded another drink, just to prove a point. At Miller's, we stopped, figuring James knew best.

I assumed that our reason for meeting that night, to the extent we needed one, was the publication of a local-boy-made-good profile of Larry in the Peoria paper. The week before, I'd given the reporter a quote for the piece, saying that Larry could take a mediocre script and make a great radio commercial. The moment I'd given it, I knew the quote would read like little more than an agent promoting her client and herself, but what did I care? I wasn't chasing any business downstate, and Larry was as good as I'd said.

When I walked into Miller's, Larry wasn't at the bar. I caught James's eye with a wave, and he pointed me to the back corner of the restaurant. I found Larry in a booth decorated with mangy golden garland and yellowing plastic mistletoe. He leaned over a nearly finished drink that obviously wasn't his first of the night.

I took off my coat and tossed it onto the bench opposite Larry. “Looks like the party started without me.”