Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

by Stuart McLean

  He looked around the cavernous glass-walled building in panic. Everyone but him seemed to know where they were heading. Everything seemed to be in motion. The conveyor belts of luggage, a family carrying something in a blue plastic kennel, businessmen with their swinging briefcases, a golf cart beeping its horn as it whipped by him.

  This was a moment for regrouping. Dave should have stopped for a moment, even a brief moment. He should have stopped and looked at his ticket, should have checked one of the departure screens hanging from the ceiling. But the clock was ticking, and there was a hundred yards of open terminal stretching in front of him. Without stopping to think where he was going, Dave began to run. He was working on straight instinct. He could read the screens on his way by them. If he was going the wrong way, so be it. He didn’t have time to stop and think. As long as he was moving, he still had a chance. He still had ten minutes. Over and over he was repeating his mantra: I am going to make it. I am going to make it.

  With eight minutes to go he got in the wrong check-in line—the first-class line. He chose it because it was the shortest. When he got to the counter the woman almost waved him away. But she could see the panic in his eyes. She took the fax he had pushed under her nose and said, “Where is your ticket?”

  Dave said, “This is an electronic ticket. It says I don’t need a ticket.”

  The woman behind the counter said, “That’s only if you’re in an American airport. In Canada you need a ticket.”

  Dave was about to argue, but the woman had already begun to print him a ticket, and miracles of miracles, it was already stuttering out of her machine. He grabbed it and was running again, lurching toward the next stop—immigration. The officer waved him through with a nod and a smile, and he was home free. There were still five minutes to go and he was still moving, still running. His shirt was untucked and his heart was pounding. He was sticky with sweat. But he was going to make it.

  And that’s when he hit security.

  It’s always at the moment when you think victory is yours that things start going wrong. Dave cleared the metal detector, and was waiting for his suitcase to clear the X-ray machine. So was the security guard. A heavy-set, thin-lipped Mediterranean woman.

  She looked at the X-ray screen suspiciously, then looked up at Dave and said, “Open your suitcase, please.”

  Dave fumbled with the lock, trying to open the bag as quickly as he could—slowing himself down with his hurry.

  The lock clicked open on the third try, and Dave took a step back from the table, looking at his watch, looking down the corridor toward his gate, looking desperately at the guard as she reached into his suitcase and pulled out his little Ziploc plastic bag. She held his razor in the air, swinging the ball of duct tape and dangling wires in front of his face.

  She said impassively, “What is this, sir?”

  It was the last thing he was thinking of. Everything else seemed so much more important. To get so close and stumble on the last hurdle. To have to phone home and face Morley, I missed the plane, as if she hadn’t warned him a hundred times. As if she hadn’t warned him that very morning.

  He tried to get calm. He breathed deeply. He noticed that everything around him had ground to a halt. The hustle and bustle of the security check had stopped. Everyone was staring at him. He was surrounded by businessmen in business suits: men with sleek leather carry-on bags, men with cellphones, men carrying The Wall Street Journal, men staring at his corduroy pants and his suede shoes and his untucked shirt tail. They wanted to know the answer to the question as much as the security guard: What was this mess of tape and wires hidden in his luggage?

  Dave felt his heart sink. A man’s razor, after all, is a reflection of his masculinity, a symbol of his manhood. He was surrounded by stud horses, all of them pawing the ground as they waited on his explanation.

  “It’s my razor,” he said pathetically. He thought he heard one of the men whinny. He was engulfed by a wave of self-loathing.

  But he still had four minutes before his plane was scheduled to leave, and he was not about to give up. Not yet. He focused on the guard standing in front of him, still dangling the razor in front of his face. He began to explain about his uncle Jimmy. The businessmen began shaking their heads, began walking away. Even the security guard wasn’t listening to him.

  “You are going to have to turn it on for me, sir,” she was saying. “You are going to have to shave for me.”

  She spoke maddeningly slowly. As if Dave was a young child.

  Dave was no longer thinking about Morley or the businessmen or even the security guard. All he could think about was his game plan, and his game plan was about to blow up in his face.

  It was fight or flight.

  Dave looked at the security guard and blurted, “I don’t have time to turn it on. I don’t have time to shave. You keep the razor. I don’t want the razor. It’s yours.” Then he grabbed his suitcase and ran.

  He ran down the corridor with his half-opened suitcase jammed under his arm, his other fist clenched and pumping the air. He ran with his head snapping back and forth, checking the gate numbers as he flew along. He ran as fast as he could—thrusting the suitcase above his head as he squirmed through a confusion of conventioneers. He was propelled through the early-morning crowd by fear—not only the fear of missing his plane but another fear, a residue fear, a childhood fear—the fear of getting caught. He was sure he was being chased.

  When he pulled up at his gate there were still forty-five seconds left before his flight was scheduled to leave, but there was no one around—no one. The gate was deserted. The sign behind the counter said New York, but there wasn’t a soul in sight.

  A departure gate has a certain funereal feel to it when it is devoid of passengers and animated clerks. Dave sensed there was something wrong. But he didn’t stop moving. He couldn’t stop moving.

  For the forty-five minutes since Dave had left home he had been possessed of the determination of a migrating elk. All he knew, all he was conscious of, was the need to keep moving. He had been engulfed by that determination for so long that he wasn’t about to drop it now, so he did something he knew he wasn’t supposed to do. He burst through the crash doors and began to lurch along the corridor looking for the tunnel that would lead him to his flight. As the doors swung shut behind him, they made an ominous click. Whoops, thought Dave, maybe I shouldn’t have done that. But there was nothing to do now but keep going. He followed the deserted corridor until he came up against another door. It was locked. And it wouldn’t open. He stood there foolishly. He tried the handle again, shaking it the way you might shake a recalcitrant vending machine.

  He was so close—but he had apparently come to the end of the line. His shoulders sagged. He dropped his suitcase. He stood there without moving. And then simply because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, Dave pulled out his ticket and stared at it: Toronto to New York, Flight #542. Departure 9:05 a.m. Not 7:05 a.m., 9:05 a.m. He should have felt like a fool. He didn’t. He felt happy. He punched the air with his free fist. He was going to make it.

  And not only that.

  He could go and get his razor back.

  He followed the passage back to the crash doors before he realized he wasn’t going anywhere. He was in a no-man’s land. All around him were locked doors that he couldn’t open. He peered through a small window that looked back into the terminal. He waved at people heading toward their gates. He jumped up and down—trying to get someone’s attention. No one noticed him. He felt like a little boy who had lost his mother at the supermarket. He turned back toward the plane. The only way out was to walk down the long hallway, through customs and back to where he started.

  The cavernous customs hall was deserted save for two uniformed officers sitting at a desk, drinking coffee from Styrofoam cups. When Dave walked in, they both stared at him with complete amazement. It was seven in the morning—there wasn’t an international flight due to arrive for an hour.

 
; “Where did you come from?” they asked simultaneously.

  They were more understanding than Dave could ever have hoped them to be. They let him through with a minimum of fuss, apologizing when they made him fill out a customs form. Regulations, they explained. Dave declared a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of Scotch. They took his form and pointed him down another long corridor. Two minutes later he was vomited back into the terminal, right where he began. He marched back through the airport, bypassing the ticket counter, carefully avoiding the immigration clerk who had processed him not fifteen minutes earlier.

  And back to security, standing patiently in line until he came face to face with the same guard.

  “Aren’t you the guy with the razor?” she said, reaching for her walkie-talkie.

  “I changed my mind,” said Dave. “I want it back.”

  Someone produced a long extension cord and she made him turn it on. She motioned at his face. He asked if they couldn’t do that somewhere out of sight. There must be a little room? She didn’t even acknowledge the request. He had to shave beside the X-ray machine. It felt as if he was taking down his pants in public. But he was beyond embarrassment.

  She waved him on.

  “Okay,” she said.

  He got a coffee and a doughnut and went right to his gate. There was still an hour and a half before his flight. There was a clerk there now, but Dave was the first and only passenger.

  He sat down and smiled at her. She smiled back.

  “You’re early this morning,” she said.

  He nodded calmly, serenely.

  “I always try to be,” he said. “I’ve never understood those people who wait until the last moment.”

  Morley’s Christmas Pageant

  The annual holiday concert at Sam’s school is a December celebration with a thirty-seven-year tradition that has been struggling for an identity of late—ever since the school board decreed that any December pageant must acknowledge the cultural diversity of the school. It’s a dictum that does not sit well with certain parents—and changes to the concert have been debated passionately over the past few years.

  Efforts to find a middle ground, to accommodate both the Christmas traditionalists and the Board of Education have met with varying degrees of success. Last year’s “Solstice Celebration” made no mention of Christmas until the end of the show, when the grade-three class lined up on stage holding big cardboard letters that spelled out Merry Christmas. One by one, kids stepped forward with their letters and shouted out their greeting:

  M is for Muslim, E is for Ecumenical, R is for Reform Jew.

  When they got through Merry and it was time for the C in Christmas, Naomi Cohen held up her big green C and sang out, C is for Chanukah; and then Moira Fehling, who was standing beside her, held up her red H and said, H is for Hanukkah too.

  Then the grade threes sang, “Dreidl Dreidl Dreidl.”

  That was Lorretta McKenna’s grade three. Loretta was perky and keen and full of ideas like that. She didn’t come back this year.

  The concert managed to offend so many parents, on both sides of the issue, that a committee was struck to review the whole idea. It was Rita Sleymaker, the committee chair, who came to Morley in April and asked for her help.

  “You’re in theater,” she said. “We want to put on a musical. A holiday sort of musical. We were hoping you would direct it.”

  “I can’t imagine anything I would rather do,” said Morley. Although she had no trouble imagining other things she would rather do as soon as she had hung up.

  “I would rather have a needle in my eye,” she said to Dave that night. “But I couldn’t say no.”

  Morley began attending the Wednesday-evening committee meetings. When she came home from these meetings, it would often take her hours to wind down.

  “They’re all crazy,” she’d say, pacing back and forth. “I’d rather chew tinfoil than go back next week.”

  But before summer vacation her impatience began to dissipate.

  “We’re getting to the meat of it,” she said one night in June. “It’s down to The Wizard of Oz or Frosty the Snowman.”

  Frosty won. It was the perfect play for the pageant. They could do it without carols or mention of Christian tradition.

  “It captures the true spirit of the season,” said the school trustee enthusiastically when the script was sent to her. “It has music. And shopping.”

  Morley spent the summer rewriting Frosty the Snowman, essentially expanding the play so there would be a part for all 248 children. She added lots of street scenes, and when she was finished, there was a role for everyone, including a cameo for the principal, Nancy Cassidy, whom Morley coaxed into playing a talking pine tree.

  In September there was an unexpected registration bubble, and Morley found herself a dozen roles short. She fussed with the script for a week, until, in a flash of inspiration, she added a narrator. She conceived of the narrator as a chorus, a chorus that would easily soak up the twelve new kids and any others who wandered along before Christmas. All her early reluctance had given way to outright enthusiasm. She had her arms up to the elbows in the mud of this play.

  “This is fun,” she said to Dave one night as she collated scripts. She couldn’t wait to get going, couldn’t wait to start with the kids.

  The Saturday before the auditions were scheduled, parents began showing up at the house offering help. Katherine Gilcoyne was first.

  “I’m a seamstress,” she said. “I’m sure there’ll be lots of sewing. I’d love to help with the costumes.” Morley was delighted. They had coffee and talked about the play and then, after an hour, when she was leaving, as if it was just an afterthought, Katherine reached into her purse and pulled out a brown manila envelope.

  “This is Willy’s résumé,” she said.

  Willy was her son. Willy was in grade five.

  It was a twenty-page résumé, including an eight-by-ten glossy.

  “He really wants to be a snowman,” said Katherine, standing in the doorway. “Get him to recite his Lions Club speech. He won the gold medal. I think he would make a great Frosty.”

  Ruth Kelman arrived about an hour later. Right-to-the-point Ruth. “I heard you weren’t considering girls for the snowmen,” she said, her arms folded across her chest. Her car was in the driveway, still running. Her daughter, Joanne, was sitting glumly in the passenger seat; her husband was in the back.

  Seven-year-old Joanne has been the breadwinner in the Kelman family for three years: the star of a series of soap ads and an obnoxious peanut-butter commercial. Ruth spends her life jetting around town with her daughter, lining up at one audition after another.

  “What’s the difference,” said Morley sourly when they were gone, “between those auditions and a rug factory. If they got Joanne a job in a rug factory, they wouldn’t have to spend all those hours waiting around at auditions.”

  As the rainy mornings of November folded into dark December afternoons, the play gradually took shape. The children were slowly settling into their roles. There were, eventually, four Frostys—two girls and two boys. At the beginning of the month, however, with only three weeks to go before the big night, no one knew the lines by heart, not even Joanne Kelman, whom Morley had cast as a villainous troll. But everyone was coming along, and Morley trusted the kids would eventually arrive where they should. Or close enough. Besides, there was a bigger problem than unlearned lines.

  The story, as Morley had rewritten it, turned on a flashback—a scene in which Frosty recalled his days as a country snowman. For the all-important farmyard scene Morley had drafted Arthur and cast him as a sheep. Arthur, a docile and well-behaved dog by nature, did not adjust easily to the stage. The first few times Morley Velcroed Arthur into his sheepskin, he stood in the wings and refused to move, staring balefully out from under his sheep ears in abject humiliation. But as the weeks progressed Arthur underwent a character change. He grinned whenever he saw his costume, curling his lips back so y
ou could see his teeth, flattening his ears and squinting his eyes. It was while he was dressed as a sheep that Arthur sniffed out and ate the contents of every lunch bag from Miss Young’s grade-four class. He had his sheep costume on when he devoured the huge gingerbread house that Sophia Delvecchio had constructed and donated to the school. And it was while he was dressed as a sheep that he snarled at Floyd, the janitor, when Floyd found him padding down the corridor heading for the cafeteria.

  The closer they came to opening night, the more problems Morley uncovered. The afternoon they moved rehearsals into the auditorium, it became clear that there was not enough room for everyone on stage.

  “The stage isn’t big enough for the narrators,” said Morley to Dave one afternoon on the phone after rehearsal.

  It was Dave’s idea to erect scaffolding and put the chorus of narrators on what amounted to a balcony.

  “Perfect,” said Morley. “Brilliant.”

  Dee Dee Allen’s father, who was in construction, said he could provide scaffolding.

  Morley had thought one of the benefits of working on the play would be an opportunity to get to know some of the kids. Mostly she got to know Mark Portnoy. Mark who couldn’t sit still. Mark who spent one entire rehearsal pulling the window blinds up and down, up and down. Mark who tied Jane Capper’s shoelaces together. Mark who brought a salamander from the science lab to technical rehearsal and dropped it into Adrian White’s apple juice.

  Late one afternoon when she thought she was the only person in the school, Morley came across Mark in the grade-five classroom. He was going through a desk with a suspicious intensity. She had a feeling it wasn’t his desk.

  “Hello, miss,” he said guiltily when he saw her, picking up his bag and leaving the room.

  Morley now had a constellation of mothers orbiting her. Alice Putnam, overweight and perpetually cheerful, was in charge of the refreshment committee. Pale, gaunt and efficient Grace Weed was in charge of programs. Patty Berg, loud but trustworthy, was in charge of decorations.