The Voiceover Artist

by Dave Reidy

  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 2nd—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.

  “It’s funny you should mention the Yankees.”

  Still smiling, Earley walks to the backside of the recording console so that all of us can see his face. He’s in complete control of the room. I can do nothing but watch.

  “You know how many seats there ar
e in the new Yankee Stadium, kid?” he says, twisting at the hips to face Michael.

  Michael is nervously sliding his thumbnail between his two front teeth. He shrugs. “Forty thousand?”

  “Fifty-thousand, two-hundred ninety-one,” Earley answers. “It’s fucking huge. And from at least a few thousand of those seats, the game is basically unwatchable. A bad angle or obstructed view or both. Yankees’ ticket prices are the highest in baseball, in a shitty economy, and more than half the home games are against losing, no-profile teams. Despite all that,” he says, clearing invisible smoke from the air in front of his eyes, “the Yankees led the American League in attendance last year. You know how they did it?”

  The question isn’t rhetorical. Earley is waiting for an answer.

  “I don’t know, man,” Derrion says, sitting on his little rolling chair. “Yankee tickets sell themselves.”

  “Bullshit,” Earley says. “Not for a weekday game against Minnesota, they don’t.”

  He looks around at each of us—Michael, Simon, then me—waiting for someone else to venture a guess. No one says anything.

  “People who know sports marketing know how the Yankees fill their seats, even against bad teams. The Yankees have Terri Schorr.”

  I want to throw up. I don’t know how Earley found out—by stalking Terri online, maybe, or over lunch with someone in the Yankees front office who knew our family growing up—and I have no idea how long he’s been waiting to tear off my mask.

  “Terri Schorr is the best woman in sports marketing.”

  The way Earley hits woman makes me want to scream. Earley and men like him aren’t good enough to carry my sister’s briefcase.

  Then Earley looks at me and pays my sister a compliment: “She could sell out a Red Bulls game.”

  And you can’t, Lily. Earley doesn’t say the words, but everyone in the control room hears them.

  “I’d kill to work with Terri Schorr,” Earley says, still looking at me. “I’ve been trying to get a meeting with her or her boss for years. But where am I?” He raises his palms and looks around with disgust at the analog soundboard, the unfashionable recessed lighting and worn carpet. “I’m stuck in fucking soccer. With Terri’s little sister.”

  Michael’s eyes dart to me. “But your last name is Eisenberg.”

  I’m not sure Michael knows my first name. I’ve never heard him use it. Later, when I can think straight, I’ll find it interesting that the surname that pegs me as a Jew was right on the tip of his tongue.

  Simon is sweating from the forehead and the upper lip, and his jaw muscles are flexing beneath the skin. He wants out of here, I can see that, but I can only let him go as far as the sound booth. I don’t remember the last time I needed rescuing, but I need Simon to save me now.

  “We should get started, Simon,” I say.

  Simon clears his throat again—audibly, this time. “Okay,” he says.

  The two syllables sound clipped, as if he can’t quite get enough air.

  I worry that Earley will try to stop Simon—Stick around, guy, there’s more to tell!—but he lets him leave for the sound booth. Earley picks up an open folding chair, carries it past Michael, and plops it down, backwards, between my seat and Derrion’s. He straddles the chair’s built-in cushion and props his forearms on the aluminum backrest, like a kid trying to act cool in a Molly Ringwald movie, or a copy of a copy of James Dean. I’m sure Earley has used the same stance when he sits down next to a woman in a low-cut shirt and offers to buy a round of drinks for her and her girlfriends. As he stares at me, daring me meet his eye, all I can feel is his menace.

  The moment Simon puts on his headphones, I am in his ear.

  “When you’re ready, Simon, do a read-through so Derrion can get some levels.”

  Simon nods, then he nods again, and only then does it hit me that he isn’t nodding. He is loosening up his neck, maybe, or indulging a tic he cannot control any longer. He starts to read. His voice is raspy and tight, as if the air in his lungs isn’t air at all, but hot tobacco smoke. I steal a glance at Derrion. His hand is on the mouse, but it isn’t moving. He is staring through the glass, wincing at Simon.

  “Why don’t you give us another one,” I say to Simon.

  Simon rolls his head around and around, as if he’s trying to induce vertigo, and then he speaks. In the first sentence, he interrupts himself twice to swallow.

  “All the times you heard me say I wanted to work for the Yankees,” Earley says.

  His blood is up, but his volume is down. I’m the only audience Earley needs now.

  “I must have sounded pathetic,” Earley says, goosing the word pathetic with a hiss.

  Simon is looking at me through the glass, his eyebrows arched, as if he’s waiting for me to say that his last reading was good enough and he can go home now. I decide against another read-through. I gamble that, for Simon, rehearsals are meaningless because they can’t generate the pressure of a real take.

  “Okay, Simon, we’re going do to one for real now,” I say, pressing the mic button. “Do you need water or anything?”

  Or hot tea? Or whiskey? Anything to let out the voice I heard in Bill Albert’s office.

  Simon shakes his head. He isn’t speaking unless he has to.

  “Okay, then.”

  “Take one,” Derrion says.

  “When you’re ready, Simon.”

  Simon begins another anaphylactic non-performance of my script, and Earley picks up his monologue where he left it.

  “I asked myself why you never put me in touch with your sister,” he says. “At first, I figured you thought I wasn’t good enough—not good enough for the Yankees, not good enough for Terri.” A laugh escapes from his nose. “Now I know different.”

  “Let’s try another take, Simon,” I say.

  “Take two,” Derrion says.

  Simon sounds as if he’s being garroted from behind. He does neck rolls between each throttled sentence.

  “This isn’t about what you think of me,” Earley says. “It’s all about what your sister thinks of you.”

  “Stop it, Kevin,” I say, quietly. “Please.” Then, over the mic, I say, “We’re ready for another one, Simon. Try to relax, okay?”

  “Take three,” Derrion says.

  Simon begins again. I close my eyes and listen to the asphyxiation of my commercial and my career.

  “Your sister doesn’t think you’re good enough for the Yankees,” Earley says.

  I say nothing.

  “If she did, you wouldn’t be fucking around in this minor-league sport. You’d be in the big leagues already!”

  When I open my eyes, Simon Davies is staring at me, helpless.

  Save me.

  “It’s a good thing you never mentioned me to your sister,” Earley says. “I don’t want your stink on me.”

  I stand up suddenly, sending my wheeled chair into the wall of hard drives and tape decks behind me.

  “Yo,” Derrion says.

  He is scolding me for my carelessness with his equipment, but I don’t apologize. I jerk open the control-room door.

  “That’s it,” Earley yells after me. “Run out of here! Prove your sister right!”

  I cover the fifteen feet to the sound-booth door with quick, choppy steps, fighting back the oncoming wetness in my eyes. I try to get angry—Fuck Kevin Earley, fuck the Red Bulls, fuck that fucking intern—but when the anger comes, it’s useless. Empty.

  As air rushes past the open sound-booth door and into the hallway, Simon whips his head around. He looks like a terrified child.

  “Come out here, Simon,” I say, holding the door open. “Please.”

  Simon takes off his headphones and carefully hangs them over the top edge of the music stand. I get the idea he is certain he is being fired. I would fire him if I could replace him in the next fifteen minutes, but I can’t. My options are Simon or nothing.

  I let the door close and we stand face to face in the weird, soundproof silence o
f the hallway.

  “Look,” I say to Simon. “When I told you the script was just about soccer, I lied. It’s about me. I imagined myself as a fan in the stands, I saw the game I’ve played all my life, and I wrote down everything there is to love about it. The love in it”—I mean the script, but I point at the sound booth—“is mine. I’m the human being in the script.”

  I could go on. I could tell him that the language is borrowed from baseball and why that matters, that this spot is my only chance at the dream I’ve been chasing for years, that if this commercial doesn’t happen, the detour I’ve taken around my sister’s success will become something else—a permanent rerouting away from the life I want and my opportunity to measure up, on my own terms, to the great Terri Schorr. But I don’t say any of these things.

  What I do say is vague and incomplete, but the moment I say it is the closest I’ve come to standing naked in front of a strange man. “I need this to work.”

  Simon’s eyes stay locked on mine, but his rigid neck relaxes. He drops his chin just slightly and lifts it, then makes the same pair of movements two more times—a perfectly normal nodding of the head.

  “Me, too,” he says.

  They’re just two words, but he got them out, and they give me the feeling that Simon understands me.

  “Okay,” I say.

  Simon nods—normally, again—and turns to the door. With his hand on the stained balsa wood, he rotates his head slowly through his neck’s full range of motion. Then he pushes the door open and disappears into the booth. The ritualism of Simon’s movement is chilling. Standing alone in the hallway, I’m confronted again with the possibility that I have rented damaged goods.