The Voiceover Artist (31 page)

The script is a single paragraph, seven and a half lines that time out to forty-nine seconds in my slow, monotonous reading, leaving at least ten seconds for the swappable tags that advertise the dates and times of upcoming games. The narrative follows the arc of a live New York Red Bulls experience, from the stadium gates' opening to a last-second victory for the home team, and its imagery—a field of perfectly manicured grass, a white ball soaring to seemingly impossible heights—lends to soccer the reverence that radio commercials usually reserve for national parks and for baseball.

This is no accident. It's the angle I'm playing.

Kevin Earley has worked every connection he has to land a job with the Yankees. He's bought dinners for guys who know somebody in the front office to increase the chances that the next time the Yankees need somebody in marketing, they'll call him. I don't schmooze. It's not me. For the past three years, though, every time the Yankees have needed somebody below director level in marketing, they've called me first. The offers weren't official—nobody in the Yankees' HR department has my résumé on file—but they were real. I know, because the woman who made the offers is my sister, Terri Schorr.

And if Kevin Earley knew all this, he'd despise me even more than he does.

 

•••

 

NINE YEARS OLDER
 than me, Terri was already a giant in sports marketing when I was still at Ithaca College. She was the youngest Director of Marketing in the long history of the New York Yankees franchise, and the first woman to hold that position. She's won more Sports Marketer of the Year awards, from more organizations, than anyone but my mother cares to count. Terri's glass statues and brass plaques occupy almost every inch of the credenza in my mother's dining room. Except for an eleven-by-seventeen portrait of Terri with her perfect family—her husband Jeff, a Wall Street lawyer, and my three gorgeous nieces—an entire wall of my mother's living room has been dedicated to framed trade-magazine covers that feature Terri. “My cover girl,” my mother calls her, as she shows off the glossy photos to neighbors and friends. Behind Terri in each one of those cover shots are the overlaid N and Y recognized the world over. The Yankees
are
the biggest brand in sports, and nobody outside the team's baseball operations plays a bigger role in building it than Terri Schorr does.

Does my sister's success with the Yankees look like the answer to all my problems? It's not. It
is
the problem.

Terri knows I can write. She's told me so. I never send her my work, but my mother nags me for it, and I send it to her, knowing full well that it will end up in an envelope in Terri's mailbox at Yankee Stadium. The only thing my mother wants more than to see me married—“To a man or a woman,” she told me once, “I'm not particular”—is for me to join my sister in the Yankees' marketing department. She's no baseball fan, my mother, but to her way of thinking, Terri could ensure I'd never want for work.

“Jobs at advertising agencies don't last,” my mother says, parroting a truism she heard on some reality show. “If you were with Terri and the Yankees, I'd never have to worry about you!”

She's not wrong about working at an ad agency. By and large, when your client is gone, you're gone, too. What my mother forgets, though, is how much she loves to worry, and what she doesn't understand is that I can never work for the Yankees. In my own mind, Terri's accomplishments haven't opened any doors. They've closed entire city blocks. To get where I want to go, I have to take the long way around.

Three times Terri has asked me about working for the Yankees. Each time, she has done it the right way. Privately. Respectfully. When I say
Thanks, but no thanks,
she doesn't push or pressure me. She doesn't even ask for an explanation.

“You should take your career where
you
want to take it,” she says.

And I believe that Terri means what she says. But I've never been able to convince myself that, when Terri made these offers to me, she believed I was the best person for the job. I can't shake the idea that she is such a big fucking deal—so big she doesn't really need the Yankees anymore—that she can burn some political capital getting her kid sister a job, with no better reason than giving her mother some peace of mind. No, I can never work for the Yankees. If
I
can't be sure I'd be getting the job on my merits, why would anyone else believe I've earned it?

My sister's success is the reason I have turned down Kevin Earley's dream job three times to keep promoting a soccer team named for a cocktail mixer. It's the reason I use my maternal grandmother's maiden name—Eisenberg—on my business card. It's why I've kept my sister's identity a secret from my colleagues and sworn her to keeping my professional whereabouts from hers. Terri's success with the Yankees is also the reason why, after a lifetime of rooting for Jeter and Posada and Rivera and anyone else who wore the navy blue pinstripes, I've written a soccer spot with the specific intention of catching the ear of New York's other baseball team: the Mets. When it airs, I'll send a recording of the Red Bulls commercial to the Mets' director of marketing. My best hope is that he'll listen to the spot and decide, with envy that burns him up inside,
That should've been ours.

I figured I could take a year to turn my “Take Me Out to the Soccer Match” idea into a campaign and send each major piece of it to the higher-ups in Mets' marketing, gradually moving my résumé to the top of the list of people to call the next time the department has an open position to fill. As it turns out, I won't have the chance to do things slowly.

Four days ago—Monday morning, August
2
nd—my group creative director, Allison, sat me down and delivered what she thought was good news.

“You've done a nice job on the soccer slice of the Red Bull business, Lily,” Allison said. “I read the radio spot you wrote. It's good.”

“Thank you.”

“I want to give you a shot at the big time. I'm moving you to the energy-drink side of the account.”

I said nothing.

“We're prepping a new campaign. I need TV spots—nationals—and if I like what you write, you'll work with that director—what's his name, the guy who did that movie with the cars and the robots? Anyway, you'll spend two weeks in L.A. as the writer on his set. It's the closest most of us ever get to living the Hollywood dream.”

I knew better than to protest. I'd seen many creatives fight the move from one piece of this business to another. The arguments went nowhere. On Allison's team, you went where you were told, or you left the agency.

“You don't look too excited,” Allison said.

“Oh, I am,” I lied. “It's just that we're doing some cool things on the soccer side now. We've finally found our footing, you know?”

“I know,” she said. “That's why I can afford to move you off of it.”

I nodded and faked a smile.

“Finish the spot you're working on,” she said, as if my commercial were just something to be crossed off a list. “We'll talk again next week.” Allison stood up and stuck her hand out in front of me. “Congratulations, Lily.”

Standing and shaking Allison's hand, I felt more like I was being laid off than accepting a promotion. A move to the energy-drink side of the Red Bull business would be fantastic news for someone who wants to make a career of copywriting, no matter the industry. For someone looking to get into baseball—for me—the move is a disaster. Red Bull is an energy drink, sure, but not the sporty kind. It's a party beverage for a young demo with little interest in ballgames. If soccer is a detour on the route I've mapped out, the energy-drink business is a black-ice skid into a ravine. There's even more riding on my soccer spot now than there was when I wrote it. My first shot at parlaying my work for the New York Red Bulls into a job with the New York Mets is the only shot I'll get.

And my ace in the hole is Simon Davies.

Walking slowly back to my cubicle after my meeting with Allison, I heard a snippet of a recorded voice through an open office door. What caught my ear first was the vocal integrity of each spoken word. I was standing a good fifteen feet away from the speakers—they weren't even pointing in my direction—and every syllable kept its shape and edges over the distance. Other people have voices like light bulbs: bright but diffuse. This voice had the focus of a laser beam. But what kept me listening outside a colleague's door was nothing mechanical. In the words he spoke, I could hear the young man's reverence for his work. His approach, which seemed almost religious, sparked a sense of mystery I hadn't experienced since I was a girl sitting in temple on Rosh Hashanah. Right then, I knew I had to have this voice for my spot. No other voice gave it a better chance of working for me and for the Mets.

I rapped my knuckles on the doorframe and ducked my head into the office of Bill Albert, a doughy, balding senior copywriter staffed to another small sliver of the Red Bull account: The Red Bull No Bull Comedy Tour.

“Who is that?” I asked, pointing in the direction of his desktop speakers.

Bill stared at me through his thick, wire-frame glasses, as if he were translating my question into another language he understood better. By the time he finished, the voice I'd heard had given way to another.

“David Cross?”

“No.”

“Patton Oswalt.”

“No. It's nobody famous, I don't think. The other voice.”

Then he leaned forward, took his portable laptop mouse in hand, and squinted at the tiny screen as he scrolled.

“Simon Davies,” Bill said.

“Is he out of New York?”

Still reading the screen, Bill pinched his face and bared his teeth like a burrowing rodent. “Chicago,” he said.

With the tiny budget I had for this commercial, flying in talent for the session should have been out of the question, but I poured almost as much creativity into the finances as I'd lavished on the script. I called the recording studio and told them we wouldn't need two hours, that one would do it. I used my credit-card frequent-flyer miles to book the round-trip flight. I'd pay for his hotel room and meals out of pocket.

If I was only getting one shot, I was taking it with Simon Davies.

 

•••

 

NOW, I REGRET
 cutting the session in half. I want to give Simon as much time as he needs to ease into that reverential state of mind, but I have only twenty-five minutes left.

While Simon pores over the script as if I've asked him to perform it from memory, Kevin Earley finishes his story for Michael, detailing the damage done to people and property in a fight we are to believe began with one hothead on the other side of the standoff finally throwing a punch and ended with Earley and his buddies kicking ass with fists and pool cues.

I have given Simon all the time I can spare.

“Any questions I can answer?” I ask him. “Before we get started?”

Simon glances at Earley and appears to clear his throat without making any noise.

“Would you say there is any character in this script?” Simon asks.

My first thought is that I've been insulted. “Excuse me?”

Simon tries again. “Would you say the script is about a person? A human being?”

From the couch, Michael looks at me as if to ask,
Is this guy for real?

“It's about soccer,” I say. “Plain and simple.”

Simon nods like a man admitting he's asked for more than he deserves. “Okay.”

Then Earley takes a step toward Simon and says, “Let me take the pressure off you, guy. None of this matters. At all.” The red jewel of Earley's large class ring glints in the studio light as he jabs a right hand at the sound booth. “You're going to go in there, say some words, and then I'm going to go have a drink, all right?”

Everything Earley says is directed at Simon, but the person he's trying to bully is me.

There's only one feeling I've never had any trouble expressing: anger. And my anger sharpens the words I use to tell off my client.

“Why don't you just
pretend
you give a shit, Kevin.” Then I add, “Here's an idea. Pretend you work for the Yankees.”

Something in the way I say this leaves little doubt that I think pretending is the only way Kevin Earley will ever experience his dream job.

In a split second, the consequences of my outburst play out in my head. Earley will yell and scream and pull the plug on the session. He will call my creative director and complain. I will be fired. I will be left with no job, no references, and no spot to send to the Mets. I've scarcely had the chance to think these things when I realize I don't have everything right. Earley is livid—I can see it in his eyes—but he isn't yelling. He's wearing a smile as wide as the Hudson.

In that moment, I understand with heart-sinking certainty that I've handed Kevin Earley something—I'm not sure exactly what—but it's something he's been lying in wait for.