The Voiceover Artist (35 page)

 

•••

 

I GLANCE UP
 from a
Sound Mixing
how-to on equalizing the dynamics of spoken-word performances and catch Simon Davies watching me. I imagine he's wondering if he'll ever be as old and as fat as I am. What else could he be thinking? He still isn't
doing
anything. I don't like Simon Davies. Not a lick. And as I find myself with no agent and little else left to lose, I decide to go at him at a bit.

“Are you nervous?”

My delivery—knowing, with a hint of accusation—is exquisite, and the question cuts through the room's close, stuffy silence.

The kid squirms in his seat. “A little.”

“You look nervous.”

I let the statement hang there, and I hope the kid is wrestling with a deep-seated fear that he isn't cut out for this line of work. My heart races as I imagine a chain of events that begins with the kid standing up and walking out, leaving Don and the Ogilvy people with a studio booked and no talent to record.
The Voice to the rescue!

“Actually,” the kid says, “I'm worried there's been some mistake.”

“What kind of mistake?”

He shrugs. “Like I got the time of my session wrong. Or the day, maybe.”

More hope! It might be
the kid
who is mistaken, not me!

I lean forward in my chair and peer at him. “What ad agency booked you?”

“Ogilvy & Mather.”

“And they said the Biel Studio?”

“That's what my agent told me.”

I thwack the trade rag against my thigh and sit back. “What makes you think you've got any of that wrong?”

“Well,” the kid says, and then he gestures to me with an open, upturned hand. “
You're
here.”

“You think I'm here to do voiceover.”

His face goes pale. “Aren't you?”

I laugh blackly and shake my head. “You don't get it, kid. I could be with Ogilvy. I might be an in-house marketing guy with Sears. I might be an accountant here to see the guy who owns the studio. I could be
anybody
. So don't assume that my reasons for being here are your reasons. Don't assume
anything
. How the fuck would
you
know,” I say, raising the volume of my voice as I descend in its range, “why I'm here?”

The kid looks like he might cry, and I'm feeling pretty good about that, when he points his hand at me again.

“You're Larry Sellers.”

I've had cab drivers and contractors, the kind of guys who spend all day listening to the radio, recognize my voice and call out a brand. To them, I'm “the Hertz guy” or “the Wendy's guy” or “the guy from the titty-bar commercial.” But never in my career—not once—have I been recognized
by name
by a stranger. That Simon Davies knows my name warms my dread. Who else but Elaine could have told him about me? And why had she sent him here if not to finish off the career I've been poisoning since I left her?

I swallow hard without moving my head even a little. “How do you know who I am?”

“I know your voice,” the kid says. “And your work. Wendy's. Jewel Foods.”

“How do you know my
name
?”

“My mom gave me an article about you when I was a kid. I've been listening to you ever since.” The kid smiles to himself as he lowers his gaze to the floor. “I used to wave at my mom to shush her when the Jewel commercials came on.”

Before I realize I'm speaking aloud, I say, “I always enjoyed those spots.”

“I could
hear
that you enjoyed them,” Simon says, looking me squarely in the eye. “Those Jewel commercials are a voiceover artist making something out of nothing.”

“Well,” I say, “the scripts did have a natural rhythm to them.”

Simon shakes his head. “Nobody but you would have found it. The rest of us would have been reading a grocery list.”

There is silence then, and I cannot interrupt it. I have the feeling you get in dreams: that things can happen to you but you are powerless to make anything happen.

Staring at the hands in his lap, Simon says, “I was convinced I could hear it in your voice when you
weren't
enjoying yourself.”

I understand him instantly. “Maalox.”

Now, it's Simon's turn to be astounded.

“They were trying to scare people,” I say. “Heartburn on your wedding day, acid stomach in your big meeting, all that shit. I only did those spots for the work. I've always been a Rolaids man, anyway.”

Simon laughs at this, and I would swear that in his laugh I hear the kid he was when I recorded those spots, performances I've never had occasion to discuss with anyone but Elaine.

It occurs to me that
this
is the camaraderie I long for when I am not working, the same easy harmony I had in mind when I'd ask Elaine to meet me for drinks: a give-and-take between people who appreciate the business of voiceover for the art it can be. The only better company is the kind that can only be found in the sound booth, when I give over my voice to the character I create. But there's no telling when I'll get to share in that company again. Simon is the one who is supposed to be at this session—not me. And unlike Simon, I no longer have Elaine's help in getting work.

“Do you work with Elaine Vasner directly?”

Simon nods.

“How is she?”

“I don't really know. I've only met her once. And when she calls, we only talk business.”

That last word hurts in a way that makes me smile.

“Well,” I say, sitting back in my chair, “you're lucky to have her. She's the very best there is.”

I have said all I can bear to say on the subject of Elaine. My eyes drop to the magazine I am still holding open in my hand.

“She has a picture of the two of you,” Simon says.

“She does?”

“In her office. It's mostly hidden by a plant, but it's there.”

Simon's intention in bringing up this photo is clear: he is trying to be kind. And I experience his kindness as if it were a gulp of warm tea settling into my empty stomach.

Don Biel enters the waiting area, which means the session is about to begin. I haven't identified the misunderstandings that brought Simon Davies and me here to do the same job, but I'm done investigating. I know what I need to know. Simon Davies is no grim reaper, no angel of death sent to dispatch me from my professional life. He is here for the same reason I am: to work. And as I push myself to my feet to greet Don, I decide that if anyone is to take my place, it might as well be Simon Davies.

Don heads straight for me and puts his hand out. “How are you, Larry?”

“I'm fine, Don. Thanks. How's business?”

Don spreads his feet wide on carpet he installed on his hands and knees. “Okay,” he says. “Not like it was, but we're not in trouble, either. How about on your end?”

“Slower than I'd like.”

“Anything short of four sessions a day is slower than you'd like, Larry.”

“You're right about that.”

My antennae are up for any indication that Don is angry with me or pitying me—any sign at all that he believes I've missed a session he worked one of his own clients to get me—but I pick up nothing negative from him. Don, as usual, is all business, and nothing could be a greater comfort to me.

Don turns to Simon, who is standing directly in front of his seat.

“Simon?”

“Yes.”

“Don Biel. Welcome to the Biel Studio.”

“Same to you,” Simon says, shaking Don's hand. “I mean, thanks.”

The three of us stand in uneasy silence for a moment. To help us out of it, I turn to Don and say, “I assume you're here for Simon.”

“I'm here for both of you, actually.”

I narrow my eyes and shake my head, buying time for comprehension that doesn't come.

“The script calls for two voices,” Don says. “The agency is recording you together to cut costs.”

“The two of us in the booth?” I ask. “At the same time?”

“That's the idea.”

Two microphones. Two voiceover artists. Two characters. A collaboration between a young up-and-comer and a gifted professional in the autumn of his years. The spot is a
duet
—just like Sinatra used to do.

As my fears of being finished in voiceover recede, if only for the moment, I see an opportunity: Simon and I will meet on days we have no work. We will eat up the hours talking character and craft and telling stories about the business. And maybe, just maybe, Simon will lead me back to Elaine, and she will take back the only part of me still worth having.

15

 

Simon

 

ON SEPTEMBER
 
27
TH, a Monday, my phone rang, crawling with each vibration toward the edge of an oily white tabletop at the hole-in-the-wall Italian sandwich shop on the same block as my apartment.

With a mouth chock-f of beef and gravy-soaked bread, Larry Sellers mumbled, “Is it work?”

I nodded, trying to chew, swallow and waggle at the same time.

“Elaine?”

I nodded again.

Larry sent the sodden food mass down his gullet. “Pick it up.”

Holding the slender, gray clamshell in my hand, I glanced at Larry. “Should I—”

“Don't mention me. Answer it, for Christ's sake!”

Elaine informed me that I'd booked my first TV voiceover job, a thirty-second spot commissioned by a Chicago restaurateur who was opening a second location of his storied steakhouse in a new Peoria casino. Larry pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. I scribbled the session details on a napkin.

When I hung up, Larry clapped his hands together.

“Ha-
ha
!” he said, as if he'd discovered something. Lowering his face to the sandwich, he said, “You're on your way, kid.”

 

•••

 

THE STEAKHOUSE PROPRIETOR
 attended the recording session, and he didn't spend it making phone calls or checking e-mail. He stood behind the soundboard in a short-sleeved silk shirt that hung over his enormous gut, listening to every take, and once he had figured out where the mic button was, he bypassed his helpless marketing guy and made his comments directly to me.

“A little slow,” he said after an early take. He rolled his index finger in a tight circle, jangling the two gold chains on his wrist. “Pick up the pace a bit.”

A few takes later, when I had the pacing down, he said, “That one's about a seven. We need a perfect ten.”

I didn't even hear the next take. I was imagining the cathartic release of telling this guy to stick to a business he understood and leave the voiceover to me.

“That was another seven.” The restaurateur pointed at his marketing guy. “Phil could give me a seven.”

I glanced at Phil, looking for help or commiseration, but the beaten down copywriter, whose name was atop the script spread across my stand, had neither for me.

I did another take.

“Three sevens,” the restaurant owner said. “Good if we're at the casino. Not so good here.”

I laughed joylessly.

“You don't sound like you mean it, kid,” he said. “I want to hear the steaks crackling in the pan.”

Then get some goddamn sound effects,
I thought.

“I want to see the meat on the plate.”

People will see the meat. It's goddamn television.

He pulled his finger off of the mic button and barked something at Phil, who cowered under the much bigger man's scowl.

I wanted to make a show of slowly removing the headphones, dropping them on the floor, and walking out. But I made myself stay and somehow managed, through the fog of my superiority and my sourness, to recognize that what the restaurateur was asking for—spoken words that ignited all the senses—was precisely what I should have been demanding of my performance. Wasn't I just as critical of spots I heard on the radio? Didn't I want the same perfection the restaurateur wanted? Couldn't I see at least this much of myself in the steak man's beady eyes?

Why must even the most valuable lessons be learned over and over again?

I funneled the steak man's commitment, pride and attention to detail—everything but his Chicago accent—into my delivery. This version of the restaurateur—the man's vision of himself—was the character in this script. Who else would he have allowed poor Phil to write? Three takes later, the steakhouse king was standing with his arms folded across the topside of his belly, smiling broadly and savoring the perfect ten he'd been waiting to hear.

Back in the control room, I wished him luck with the restaurant and mentioned, for something to say, that I had grown up about ten miles from the site of the new casino. Shaking my right hand, the steak man put his left on my shoulder and invited me to come in for dinner—“On the house,” he said—once the place had opened. He told Phil to take down my name and number.

“You still got any family down there?” the steak man asked.

My first thought was that I didn't, but I did. “My dad lives down there.”

“Bring him in,” he said, massaging the muscle at the base of my neck with his meat hook of a hand. “We'll give you guys the VIP treatment. And I'll come by the table and tell your old man he's eating free on account of your pipes.” The steak man let out a wheezy laugh. “What father wouldn't be pleased as piss with that?”

 

•••

 

TWO MONTHS LATER,
when a call came in on a Monday night from the area code that covered Peoria and a hundred tiny towns downstate, I figured it was someone from the steakhouse following up on the boss's order to invite the kid from the commercial to come in for a meal.

I shuffled through excuses—the fact that I didn't have a car, a new job working nights, a recent commitment to veganism—as to why I could not accept the steak man's offer to host my father and me for dinner. Between the third ring and the fourth, I diagnosed my father with liver cancer.

That won't be a lie forever.

Then I flipped open the phone, said hello, and heard my father's voice.

“S— S— Simon?”

I needed three waggles to say, “Yeah.”

“It— it— it's your dad.”

A tobacco-smoke rasp eroded each syllable. He was shouting over a warbling din, and I could hear in his stutter that he'd been drinking for a while already.

“Yeah, Dad.”

“I— I— I've been s— s— seeing your c— commercial on TV. S— saw it again t— tonight.”

I had done only one television commercial. They must have been running the steakhouse spot around Peoria.

“Th— thought it was y— your brother at first. But he— he told me it was y— y— you.”

Hearing my father stutter reminded me of the unrelenting threat that my own stutter posed to my livelihood and tapped a childish, unjust vein of my anger at the man: the stutter that dogged me was
his
fault.

My anger found its way out as annoyance. “You've got the television on pretty loud there, Dad.”

“N— nothin' I— I— I can do about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“People in here want to h— h— hear the g— g— game.”

I had envisioned my father at home, sitting in his easy chair, with a few crumpled beer cans on the snack tray to his right. But I understood then that he was calling from the only other place I had known him to drink and watch sports. My father was at the Four Corners.

“I— I w— w— wanted to tell you,” he said, “that w— when your comm— commercial comes on, I— I turn around and let the wh— wh— whole bar know that that's my s— s— son's v— voice. And I tell ‘em wh— which son I mean.”

The picture he painted was pathetic: a stuttering drunk shouting out to a barroom of indifferent patrons that the voice they were trying to ignore was his son's. None of them—except maybe the man who had mocked my stutter, and the guy who had tended bar that day, if they were still alive and drinking—could have understood why my father said what he said when that steakhouse commercial came on.

“Whoa, w— w— will you l— look at this!” my father yelled. “T— t— t— touchdown!”

I thought I heard someone else shout my father's name, and then a chorus of laughter. My father breathed a tired chuckle into the phone.

I imagined him sitting at the end of the bar, a fool and a mascot for men who weren't drinking alone, and the surly bartender opening and closing his empty hand in the direction of the phone, telling him to wrap up the call. At the thought of people laughing at my stuttering father in that bar, and his drunken attempt to laugh along with them, I felt my seven-year-old self flailing to prevent something that happened twenty years before.

“Dad,” I said. “I need you to pay up and go home.”

“W— w— what d— do you mean? It— it's only the f— f— first quarter.”

“You can catch the rest of the game at home. Just get out of there.”

“Y— you know, I— I— I was th— thinking it would be g— g— good if y— you came down.”

“What?”

“F— f— for a v— visit.”

“Jesus, Dad.” I dropped my forehead into my fingers and started kneading it. “Fine. I'll come down. Will you pay up and go home now?”

“N— no need to p— p— pay up. I've got cr— cr— credit.”

“Then just go, Dad. Please.”

“All r— right. I— I— I'm going. S— s— see you, s— son.”

I stayed on the line, as if I might be able to hear his boot heels hit the floor, his truck engine whine as he reversed out of his parking spot, and the front door of our house open and close again behind him. What I heard instead were the click and rustle of an old phone changing hands, and my father saying, “Here's your d— damn ph— ph— phone back.”

Then there was the hollow—plastic crash of a receiver being smashed into its cradle. Then nothing. And despite my promise to come home and his promise to leave the bar right away, I could only believe that my father was still on his barstool, and that he would be there every night, trying to right a twenty-year-old wrong no more within his power to remedy than his stutter was.

 

•••

 

THE TWO TAXIS
 outside the train station in Peoria that Saturday night were station wagons. Adhesive decals had been sloppily applied to their passenger doors, and cardboard-backed livery licenses were wedged between dashboard and windshield. Two drivers, both older men, wore heavy insulated coats and woolen caps to keep out the December cold as they stood between the vehicles, smoking and chatting in low, familiar tones.

They noticed me at the same time. The thinner of the two, whose skin hung from his face as if it were slowly melting in the heat of his cigarette, exhaled two lungfuls of smoke and asked, “Can I help you?”

With my duffle bag in hand and my coat collar up against the whipping wind, I asked him if he knew Leyton.

“Sure, I know it,” the thin man said.

“How much to get there?”

“To the town square?”

“A few miles west of it.”

“Twenty dollars.”

“That sounds all right,” I said.

The thin man turned to his buddy. “You take this one.”

The heavier man nodded and flicked his cigarette to the opposite curb. “I guess it's my turn.”

He opened the glass hatch of his station wagon, and I threw my bag inside. When he started up the engine, the radio came on, and I caught part of a rant against President Obama's proposed budget before the driver silenced the outrage with a quick spin of the volume knob and made his engine our soundtrack.

We were out of Peoria and onto the county road in just a few minutes. I stared out my window into the thick darkness. I'd become accustomed to the orange-tinted haze that Chicago threw up against the night and forgotten what real darkness looked like. In the damp chill of that night, the blackness weighed me down like a lead blanket.

As the taxi pulled into the sideyard, the headlights drew across my father's pickup, which was parked near the back door. Saliva thickened in my mouth and throat.

He's here.

I paid my fare and grabbed my bag. The taxi made a three-point turn on the weed-pocked lawn and accelerated in the direction of the county road.

The blue-gray light of a television flickered behind the drawn curtains in the living room. No other lights in the house were on. Right then, I regretted keeping my end of the bargain I'd made with my father the week before and found myself missing the Chicago apartment that had been, to that point, just a place to wait for work. I supposed that my missing it this way meant that my apartment had become a kind of home.

Even in the moonless darkness, I found my way to the track beaten and packed by years of daily walks—most of them my mother's—from the back door to the mailbox. The toe of my shoe clipped an empty aluminum can, and I envisioned my father finishing a beer in his truck and rebelling pointlessly against the no-littering rule of a woman who left him once by moving out and again by dying.

The door was unlocked. I pushed it open and stepped into the kitchen. With the lights off, it was the smells I noticed first. Some of them were odors of stagnation and rot not dissimilar to those in my own apartment when I returned from New York. But behind and beneath these were more subtle scents, a potpourri that could not be duplicated outside this house. The wood-paneled walls were still slowly releasing the pine cleanser they had absorbed during my mother's weekly cleanings. Petrochemicals leached out of the thick, waffled soles of my father's Caterpillar-issue steel-toe boots, which he shed at the back door each day after work. I even caught a hint of my mother's inexpensive, drug-store perfume, which Connor and I had bought her every year for Mother's Day and she'd dabbed on her neck and wrists on special occasions. When I recognized the signature scent of a woman who'd been dead for years, I leapt to no conclusions about the supernatural or even the power of memory. I imagined my father, already drunk as he searched for socks to wear to the Four Corners, finding a bottle of my mother's perfume at the bottom of a drawer, holding it up in front of his eyes, and pinching the bulb of the atomizer to cover the stench he'd made and remind himself of all he has lost.