The Voiceover Artist

by Dave Reidy

  I strained to hear over the weakening breeze, waiting for Connor to speak in one of his thousand voices, but he said nothing.

  “I give up,” Candace said, shaking her head. “Who is it?”

  Connor shrugged and lifted his palms. I recognized that gesture. It was one of mine. He was asking her, pretty please, to guess.

  Candace sat rigidly on the concrete block. “I really don’t know.”

  “Seriously?” Connor shouted, himself again. He sounded annoyed, even hurt.

  “Who was it?”

  “You couldn’t tell that was Simon?”

  Candace stared at Connor for a moment. Then she turned her face and squinted into the afternoon sun. It was at least a second before I realized she was looking at me. My face went red, and I stared into the distance, just as Connor had done in his impression of me.

  “I’m only kidding,” I heard Connor say.

  Candace said something I didn’t hear.

  “Really,” Connor insisted, “it was a joke.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Candace had picked up her book again. Then, with her customary kindness, Candace said, “I’ll see you around, Connor.”

  Connor held up his hands in protest for a moment before dropping them. “All right,” he said. “See you around.”

  She hadn’t stuck up for me, really—not with the same fervor with which she’d praised Connor the moment before. But Candace hadn’t enjoyed—hadn’t allowed herself to enjoy—a laugh at my expense. Now, more than ten years after the incident, I know that Candace’s refusal to laugh had more to do with her bedrock decency than anything else. But that day, wallowing neck deep in my silent self-loathing, I could only understand her non-laugh and the squinting glance that followed it to mean that Candace Andersen, the girl of my daydreams, pitied me.

  Having sent their champion into the arena, Miro and Ken absorbed some of the embarrassment Connor had suffered and the humiliation he had doled out. Ken repeatedly zipped and unzipped the small pocket of his backpack while Miro uprooted individual blades of grass and tore them apart between his finger and thumbnails. For my part, as Connor made his way back across the lawn with his head down, I envisioned sprinting at him, pouncing on him like a predator, and beating him bloody, but I did no such thing. I knew that Connor was probably obsessing over the one laugh he’d gone for and failed to get, that he would replay his impression of me for days, dissecting it for flaws in character and timing, discounting the praise he’d received for his Mr. Lucas impression. The punishment Connor would inflict on himself was sure to be worse than any beating I could have meted out. So I left him untouched. That was my revenge.

  I’ve since wondered if any of Connor’s suffering over the next few days was rooted in some feeling that having done that impression of me, for Candace and right before my eyes, was wrong. My guess is that comedy, except insofar as doing it well was a kind of moral imperative, was not a matter of conscience for Connor, but I can’t be sure. The fact that he didn’t apologize to me doesn’t settle things one way or another. Except for the meaningless apologies our mother had forced us to make, Connor and I had never apologized to one another. Every fight, every petty tattle, every humiliation that one of us perpetrated against the other was flung without comment onto the smoldering pile of wrongs we had done one another over the years. This was how it was between my brother and me: we went on with things, to the next right or the next wrong. I never thought to ask Connor why the men in our family didn’t apologize to each other. I assumed he’d learned this unspoken maxim the same way I had: by watching our father.

  The bus arrived as the sun began to sink beneath the leafy tops of the tall oaks west of campus. As Connor and I were driven home, sitting as far apart from one another as was possible, I found myself admiring him even before my shame had cooled. Someone just out for laughs, or to impress a pretty girl, might have been satisfied with Candace’s astonished response to the impression of Mr. Lucas and quit while he was ahead. But for Connor, even the big stage that an audience with Candace Andersen provided was little more than a workshop. In his own mind, Connor wasn’t performing. He was preparing for bigger performances to come. And in his ruthless determination to understand, by the time his golden opportunity arrived, what was funny and what wasn’t and why, Connor was willing to make his mute older brother the butt of a joke, even as I watched. Slouched against the vinyl backrest of a bus bench, lost in my silence, I imagined what seemed impossible—a world in which I had a voice like the voices on the radio—and understood that, even if the impossible came true, I stood no chance of pulling even with someone as ambitious and cutthroat as my brother.

  •••

  FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER Elaine and I hung up, a new message appeared in my e-mail inbox. The subject line read, “FW: Red Bull Comedy Tour Radio – The Pitch Man.”

  The embedded chain of correspondence between Elaine and someone from the ad agency consisted mainly of logistic and administrative information—the date, time and location of the session, my hourly rate, and my union status. At the end of one of her notes, the ad-agency representative, who did not seem to be the creative director Elaine had known for years, wrote, “PLEASE make sure your client arrives at the session ON TIME, which is to say a few minutes BEFORE the session’s official start time.”

  Elaine seemed to take exception to this request.

  “Thank you for the lesson in punctuality and professionalism,” she wrote in reply. “My client will be at the session on time. While we’re on the topic of punctuality, let me remind you that I expect my client to be paid on time. If I don’t have a check IN HAND by the agreed upon date, your boss will get at least one phone call from me the first day payment is overdue, and every day after, until payment is received in full. Which is to say I’ll have MY FOOT UP YOUR ASS if the check is late. Understood?”

  I made mental notes to get to the session a half-hour early and never cross Elaine.

  I double-clicked the attached file—my first real script! And from the moment I began to scan page one, I realized it was not at all what I had been expecting.

  The script called for three different voice actors to engage in a kind of conversation. In my role as the Pitch Man, I was to relate the following details: This fall, comedians David Cross and Patton Oswalt would co-headline the Red Bull No Bull Comedy Tour—seven shows in seven cities. Tickets in each city would go on sale Tuesday, September 4th, at 10 a.m. Tickets were limited, so listeners were advised to act quickly.

  Delivered without interruption, my lines would not have taken twenty seconds of airtime. But the script called for Cross and Oswalt—playing versions of themselves—to interrupt the Pitch Man with derision of the corporate sponsor and direction about the Pitch Man’s “energy.”

  “Only Red Bull,” the Pitch Man would say, “could bring two comedians of this caliber to the same stage on the same night in seven American cities.”

  “Yeah,” Oswalt would interject. “I think democracy in Iran is next on Red Bull’s list.”

  “Tickets are limited, so act fast!” the Pitch Man would say. Then, addressing Oswalt and Cross, he would ask, “How was that?”

  Cross and Oswalt were to deliver a simple answer—“Great!”—in unison.

  And the bracketed direction beside their answer read, “[EVERYONE BUT THE PITCH MAN CAN HEAR THAT CROSS AND OSWALT ARE BEING SARCASTIC.]”

  This script was a parody of the straight-announcement voiceover work I’d admired and studied all my life. And the Pitch Man, a square and hapless stereotype of my heroes, wasn’t in on the joke.

  My disappointment didn’t stop there. That the script featured famous professional comedians made it seem like a piece of Connor’s New York dream misdelivered to me in Chicago. But this was not the only way that this job seemed better suited to Connor than it was to me: the Pitch Man wasn’t just a voice, and he wasn’t some version of myself. If he were any part of me, the Pitch Man would never have asked the comedians�
�� opinion of his work—he understood radio commercials better than they did. No, the Pitch Man was someone else entirely. He was a character, which made him more Connor’s than mine.

  Despite myself, I entertained a scenario in which Connor went to the recording session in my place. He would introduce himself as Simon Davies to people who had never seen my face. He’d enter the sound booth and bring the Pitch Man to life as a character in a voice that was imperceptibly different from my own. And for his trouble, Connor would get the chance to work—in the same commercial if not the same studio—with two big-time comedians. The creative director and the client would be pleased, Elaine would be pleased, and so long as Connor went in my place for any future sessions run by that creative director, no one would be the wiser.

  But these were merely the public aspects of the scenario. Its horrors would play out in private. I saw myself sitting on my couch, alone during the session’s appointed hour, writhing in the knowledge that I’d handed Connor a job he had neither chased nor earned and given up my first chance—maybe my only chance—to be a voiceover artist.

  Then I imagined hearing Connor’s voice, in place of mine, on the radio.

  At this thought, I made the only decision I could live with. I’d play the Pitch Man myself, and do it the only way I could: the way that Connor would have done it. From the blind of my silence, I’d watched my brother become thousands of people who were not himself. I knew what he would make of this Pitch Man, and that was all I needed to know. If the creative director was already hearing the Pitch Man’s voice as mine, I could gamble that my own pale rendition of the flesh-and-blood character Connor would’ve created would be good enough for her.

  Over the next few days, between rehearsals, I was hounded by the thought that my living some part of Connor’s dream, and appropriating his talent, sullied not only this job, but the year of spasm-inducing work I’d put into rebuilding my voice. Each time the thought nipped at my heels, I answered it with the lesson my brother taught me on the front lawn of our high school: Don’t let anyone, not even your brother, keep you from getting what you want.

  I, too, could be cutthroat.

  To run neck-and-neck with Connor after a lifetime spent so far behind him, I’d take anything of his that I needed.

  9

  Connor Davies

  IN JUNE OF ’08, when I visited my father and Simon at home for the first time in a year and a half, I got two surprises. The first: Simon could talk. The second: when Simon spoke, I heard my voice.

  “Are you doing that on purpose?” I asked him.

  He looked confused. “Doing what?”

  “Are you imitating me?”

  “No, Connor,” Simon said, smiling. “That’s just how it comes out.” He did that robotic head-tremor thing and added, “This is the only voice I’ve got.”

  I’d assumed at first that Simon, while teaching himself to talk again, had developed a talent for doing impressions. I’ll admit to feeling some relief when he said that he had only the one voice, even if it was mine. That Simon sounded like me didn’t matter much, anyway. I could do a lot more with my voice than he would ever be able to.

  We had this little chat standing in the kitchen of the house we’d grown up in. Simon was still in his busboy’s uniform—black button-down shirt, black pleated pants, scuffed black leather shoes. His hair, weighed down with sweat and oil, was pressed close to his head.

  Simon could speak all right, but had no clue how to make conversation. I felt like I was improvising a scene with a frightened, level-one student. Just for something to say, I asked Simon what he was most looking forward to, now that he had a voice again.

  Simon dropped his eyes to the dirty linoleum floor, looking sheepish and a little reluctant to answer. Then his lips crept into half a smile.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He did another headshake. “Meeting a girl, I guess.”

  I laughed. “Just one?”

  I’d meant to suggest that, with so many women out there, Simon might not want to limit himself to one. What had made me laugh, though, was the idea that any woman worth having would have Simon.

  Simon didn’t laugh, but he smiled smugly, as if suddenly having a voice or not having one for so long had clued him in to some insight I would never have.

  “I only want one,” he said.

  As my brother stood there, enjoying his one-girl-one-guy fantasy and overestimating his wisdom, I formed an opinion I still held in the summer of 2010 when Simon moved up to Chicago: I liked Simon better when he couldn’t talk.

  •••

  A COUPLE OF weeks after he moved to Chicago, Simon called my phone, and I didn’t answer. In a voicemail, Simon told me that Brittany—the girl he’d found and convinced to stick around for a while—was finished with him. In the playback of my brother’s voice, I recognized myself again, but this time, the person I heard was me at my weakest and my worst. I heard myself the way I was the night I slept with Brittany.

  When I went down to Carbondale to visit Simon, I was on a streak. Since finding out that Saturday Night Live had hired a Chicago actor who wasn’t me, I’d been doing an improv or sketch set wherever I could get one, paid or not, every night, and taking home a girl from the show’s audience. I made sure to get her first name and to remember it, no matter how drunk I was. If I was awake when she left my bed, I’d say her name and say goodbye. In those four months, I took only one night off from comedy—the night I spent at Simon’s place in Carbondale. But that wasn’t the night I broke my streak of sleeping with women I hardly knew.

  A little more than a week later, I was in the back of a bar on Belmont Avenue in Chicago, getting paid in booze to improvise with a bunch of stiffs I’d met in a commercial-acting class. I started drinking before the show, hoping that the white noise of a liquor buzz might drown out the question I kept asking myself: If this is the best show you can get tonight, how good are you, really?

  As I stood onstage at the start of the set, I did what I’d done a few times before at these off-off-everywhere sideshows: I picked one woman out of the audience and played for her only. I would never let on what I was doing. I didn’t make eyes at the woman from the stage or ask her for a word we could use to start a scene. But from the moment I chose her, no one else in the audience mattered to me. Everyone else could go on whispering and checking their fucking phones for all I cared.

  The woman I picked that night, from a crowd of about fifteen people, was sitting with three girlfriends. She had straight brown hair parted down the middle and enormous brown eyes. Her thin black t-shirt was fitted to her. She was fucking beautiful—that’s what I noticed first—but my first thought about her was, She is smart. Something in her eyes made me sure of it.

  Then I did my thing. I created characters on the spot, made scenes out of the directionless babble of the stiffs, and set them up to make and take the laugh lines. In improv, you only look as good as the people onstage with you. By the end of our set, the people onstage with me looked okay. Only someone who had done what I did that night—who had spread himself wide open to hold a scene together—would have thought I looked any better.

  When the lights and music came up, the woman I had been playing for was standing alone. Her friends were crowded around Sammy, the guy who’d invited me to join his group onstage that night.

  I went up and introduced myself to her.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Erika.”

  Remember that, I thought. “Can I get you a drink, Erika?”

  “Got one,” she said, raising a nearly empty pint glass. “Thanks.”

  I took a swallow of bourbon, nodding, and reset my feet. “You know Sammy?”

  Erika glanced at Sammy. “Uh, not really. I’m a friend of his cousin’s.”

  “Oh, cool. Sammy’s a good guy.”

  And a terrible improviser, I thought.

  “So, what did you think of the show?” I asked.

  “What did you think of it?�
�

  “Honestly?”

  Erika shrugged, as if to say she didn’t care if I answered honestly or not.

  “Not great,” I said.

  She nodded. It looked like she was trying not to smile.

  “We missed more opportunities than we took,” I went on, sliding into the kind of clichés that pro athletes doled out to reporters after a tough loss.

  “Huh,” she said. “Why do you think that is?”

  “Well—” I glanced away, trying to find a polite way to say that my fellow improvisers—Sammy included—were brutal.

  “Because your head wasn’t in it, maybe?” she asked.

  I felt like I’d been slapped. “What do you mean?”

  “You winked at me. In the middle of a scene.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes. You did. Then you winked again and waved to me.”

  I didn’t remember doing any winking or waving, but I was pretty well drunk by the middle of the set and drunker still by the end. Drinking during a show isn’t an issue, in and of itself, so long as I deliver onstage. But if I had winked at Erika and waved to her in the middle of a scene, nobody—not even Sammy—had committed any worse crime against improv that night than I had.

  Just then I had a thought I’d never considered: that doing improv every night was not making me better, but ruining me.

  “You’re better than this,” Erika said.

  Somehow, I was sure she meant I was better than this bar, the winking, the drinking—all of it. I wanted that to be true.

  Then she handed me a piece of paper. It had a phone number on it.

  “I wrote it down after you winked at me. The second time.”

  Then Erika picked up her purse and rejoined her friends.

  My streak broke that night. I went home alone. And the next day, I called Erika.

  I knew she wasn’t in comedy. I would have seen her before, if she had been. But as it turned out, Erika was in the business: she’s a voiceover artist. I was watching her nap on my couch on a Sunday afternoon, a few weeks into what I consider the first real relationship I’ve ever had, when I realized that I was living Simon’s dream—I only want one, he’d said. This thought and the guilty feeling that followed it were just the opening acts, though. The headliner was a holy fuck realization that left me feeling unsafe, as if I’d found my apartment door wide open and its locks drilled out: if I fell in love with Erika—and I was headed that way—what I’d done to Simon could be done to me.