by Aiden Bates
The Breaking Point
Aiden Bates
© 2016
Disclaimer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are all fictitious for the reader’s pleasure. Any similarities to real people, places, events, living or dead are all coincidental.
This book contains sexually explicit content that is intended for ADULTS ONLY (+18).
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Part I: Chicago
1. A Folly of Dudes
2. A Rising Star
3. Teaming Up
4. Showmance
Part II: New York
5. Audition
6. The City That Never Sleeps
7. The Breaking Point
8. On Parade
Part III: Miami
9. Home on the Road
10. The Kid Stays in the Picture
11. As Plain as the Nose on Your Face
12. MIA
Part IV: Los Angeles
13. The Big Picture
14. Dramatic Irony
15. Show Business
16. Picture Perfect
17. Bonus Chapter
Books by Aiden
Author’s Note
Part I: Chicago
1. A Folly of Dudes
Vinny’s move to Chicago is not a good idea, and everyone tells him that.
His friends tell him, “You’re going to starve to death, dude. You’re like one of those pretty idiots that move to Hollywood trying to get into the movies, and you’re not that pretty. At least they can wait tables or fall back on porn; you’ve got nothing, Vinny.”
His boyfriend told him, “If you want to break up, just say so, you don’t have to move to another state.” Vinny did want to break up, but he wanted to move too, because he wanted to follow a dream, and he didn’t want to hear a defeatist attitude from the person who was supposed to love him.
His parents didn’t say anything against it, but his mother spat when he told them the news, like her son was a bad taste in her mouth; his father told him when he drove him to the bus station in Steubenville, which would get him to the bus station in Columbus, which would get him a ticket for a ride to Chicago, “You’ll be sorry.”
Vinny assumes these people are all right, in a way. They’re right to be skeptical, and certainly they’re right when they say, “I could never do that, that’s crazy! Give up my job at the factory and my benefits? What if I had to come back, I’d have lost all that time.” For Vinny, time spent trying for something greater is not time lost, it’s time lived; one can always come back and get a cog’s job and always have enough socked away in case of disaster or bad health, but what’s the point? Great—you do all that work to stay alive just so you can wish you were dead? That’s life but it’s not living.
Vinny can sing, and though everyone is quick to tell him what a gift it is, they don’t expect that gift to keep on giving. He should get a job, and help support his parents even though they’ve never been too big on supporting him or his siblings, and sing at the Christmas mass for the glory of God and the pride of his mother, and never dare to sing for real, professionally, for an audience outside of Ohio. But that’s all Vinny’s wanted to be: somebody outside of Ohio, anybody worthy of note or respect, anywhere but home.
So as soon as he saves up enough money to split, and it takes years and years, Vinny splits: he hops on a bus with two suitcases and a backpack, bags that look even smaller when he remembers they contain everything he owns on this Earth. He arrives to hand over a big chunk of his money for a basement apartment furnished with the stuff the previously evicted tenant never had the wherewithal to come back and reclaim, and Vinny hopes he doesn’t end up just like that poor jack or jill, homeless in one of the coldest cities around come winter. The place is barely big enough for Vinny himself, but still he wishes he had another deadbeat roommate with him, so his money (and therefore his chances to make it) would last twice as long.
On his first night, Vinny doesn’t want to pay to board any train or bus, but he does want to see the lake, or the city lights, something pretty and grand. He decides to go for a walk until he’s satisfied, knowing he won’t really get lost because he’s been dreaming about this move for so long he’s memorized all the main streets, the ones on a grid, and the diagonal streets that cut straight to the heart of the city. He gets on Milwaukee Ave and just keeps walking until it ends, then he turns towards where he knows the lake is, enchanted that he can sort of feel its presence no matter which way he turns; the lake lies east and he keeps heading east until he hits the Magnificent Mile.
Michigan Ave is all for shopping, crowded with people carrying bags and popping in and out of stores that wouldn’t even hire Vinny because he doesn’t look chichi enough (and probably never will). He walks further than the Mag Mile, and ends up at the water’s edge, Grant Park and Lakeshore Drive, and that’s what makes his aching feet worth the trouble: the city at his back, the lights on the water, and the Ferris wheel lit up in the distance on Navy Pier. This is the big moment—he’s escaped Steubenville, and he doesn’t have to start starving until tomorrow. It’s a beautiful night.
The next night he falls to sleep shaking, not because it’s cold—it’s June and the city is blooming—but because asking for jobs that any idiot should be able to get (cashier, unloader, clean-up, anything) is like asking people to just hand you money for free, or at least that’s how people treat Vinny when they say no and look at the door he just walked in through, in case he’s forgotten how to leave. Begging should be what people do when they don’t want to work, why does Vinny have to beg just to avoid having to beg? The anxiety of what feels like swift and merciless failure rattles him to the bone, but he gets up the next day with the sun and heads out again. It’s a good time to be a beggar, relatively—it’s warm and cheery out, better than pounding the pavement in the snow or the baking heat of August. But he still can’t get a job.
He started looking on the nicer streets but goes seedier and seedier as the days go by. He’d take part-time, two jobs, three jobs; there are jobs he could get if he had a car, but he’s never had a car, and finally Vinny asks the wrong son of a bitch (or so he thinks) for a job and gets met with, “What job can you do besides a blowjob, Luigi?”
Vinny’s got a blow for that guy alright: a blow to the fucking face. Vinny delivers an uppercut to the jaw of this asshole sitting in front of his store’s counter (like he’s at work but he’s really worried about doing it, just kicking back), and knocks his head over. Vinny expects this to turn into a real fight, and one that he’ll lose because the guy’s got years and muscle on him and looks like a fighter—scars and attitude and everything—but he just stands up fast so Vinny isn’t tempted to try hitting him again, and rubs his jaw as he considers Vinny.
“What do you weigh?”
Vinny tells him, and the guy starts squeezing his arms.
“Take off your shirt,” he says.
“I’m not looking for a blowjob kind of job, you—” Vinny begins, but the guys makes a cut-off gesture with his hand, and shakes his head.
“No
, not that, Guido, but I do have a job if you can throw punches like that. You healthy, you willing to train up and take orders? We do fights and betting, if you really need a job you can fight. If you need two jobs, you can fight and you can do the bookie runs. What do you say, you want that job?”
Vinny says yes. He doesn’t want the job per se, but he does need it, and he does want to have enough money to stay here. He’s got auditions to go on, and hopefully the fights won’t mess up his face. That’s incentive to block if there ever was some. He wants his image to be his real money-maker eventually—his face and not his fists.
Vinny starts training and collecting right away, and it takes a few months, but by fall he knows his own schedule (and how to block his kisser), and he starts going to open mic nights, and talking to the others on that circuit, trying to find out who knows what about how to catch a real break in this city. He meets all sorts doing that.
There are other singers, of course, some with real talent and a lot more with okay voices and a lot of hoodoo about which teas and honeys are good for the vocal chords, people who have “silent hours” every day, for resting their voices—never mind that if they don’t scream in their sleep due to night terrors, their voices should get plenty of rest then.
He meets writers who either want to be poets or comedians, but it isn’t always easy to tell which is which based on their acts. Hardly anyone is funny yet, and poetry hits a drunken open mic crowd very badly—they get more laughs than the jokers, and that’s if they’re lucky. Poems about socio-economic, multi-gender, bilingual, free range, grass fed, personal politics will only stupefy and then enrage the hecklers. Everyone tries hard to go on before these people turn the room against the stage, but at least in following them you’re always going to be liked better. It’s a toss-up either way on how people react to a modern crooner like Vinny. The poets all like him, that’s something; they think it’s important that he’s so retro with his art, like a living museum piece. Vinny just doesn’t know how to sing pop songs without an auto-tuner, that’s not his strength. Vinny endures with his odd set of songs, hoping that his uniqueness will stand him out and shine through, if he’s got anything special about him at all.
So far the most special thing about him among the open mic crowd is his day job, or night job since no one wants to watch a fight in the sunshine. He’s “moonlighting as a pugilist” according to one poet, by which he means a boxer, by which he’s only half right. This isn’t boxing as in the civilized sport, it’s fighting to see who gives up first, and Vinny doesn’t win often. He fights well enough imagining he’s beating up the version of himself that he’ll be if he has to go home: some tired, cranky, minimum wage slave with no passport, no prospects, no elegance as far as the eye can see, and he takes a couple of shots at the thought of his dad and his teachers and his ex, and the way their faces would look if he came crawling back, but after that the other fighter tends to have more steam, and Vinny just tries to keep his nose out of the meat grinder at that point. His ribs looked like he’s been in a car accident, but his face so far has only caught a bit of splitting and bruising. The other singers assure him that a black eye is attractive on a man (an assumed tragedy on a girl, but Vinny’s no girl).
“I wish I could pull off that street tough kind of look!” one particularly obnoxious guy says one night. He only sings because he’s not yet lucky enough to be a model, and he tells everyone quite literally, “I’m just trying to get my face out there.”
“I’d be happy to hit you if someone would pay me to do it,” Vinny says, and the rest of the table look over their PBRs at one another with expressions that wonder, Does he mean it? Do we want to?
“I’d hit you for free, pretty boy,” says one of the comedians, trying to lighten the tension.
“I wouldn’t,” Vinny says, bringing the tension right back. “I don’t like fighting, but I’ll do what I’m paid to do. If you want a black eye, just say so and pony up, I promise not to knock your eye out of your socket in the process.”
“You don’t have the strength,” the pretty boy says, sour because he thinks he’s being mocked.
“You’re a mercenary,” pipes in one of the poets. “You moonlight as a mercenary.”
That makes the whole table go quiet just because they like the sound of it. Maybe she’ll be the one poet who actually makes it out of the lot somehow, if she can quiet a table of riff raff with something beautiful like that.
A lot of people come and go from the open mic general pool. Some people get tired of it, some busy with their real jobs, some do get into paying gigs, but most fail for so long it’s time to go back home and give up. Vinny’s pretty sure he’ll let all of his teeth get punched out before he’ll quit trying to make this work. He wouldn’t go back to Steubenville if he was a big star and they threw him a hero’s welcome home parade, he never wants to see that place again.
He sees people less talented than him start making it all the time, and that’s all he needs is the start: the first thing that puts his foot in the door and gets him out of the fight circle so he can really focus on refining what he’s got, becoming a professional. He’s optimistic enough to see these other schmos move up a rung to believe he’s up next: any time now, any time, it’s just a matter of being in the right place when your luck comes in, but for Vinny, his luck doesn’t show up as a job or an agent or a contract; his luck is a clown.
Not like a party clown, not a full makeup Ronald McDonald-kind of clown, but a sort of prat-falling, Three Stooges-kind of clown, not a comedian with jokes really, just someone with an elastic face and the ability to fall down without hurting himself, literally. His name is Lance, and Vinny finds this out not by meeting the guy or being introduced, but by seeing him perform what he calls his Lance Prance Dance, like a show horse high-stepping in place. People do laugh at this, at him more than at his antics, but he never tires and never seems discouraged in the few times Vinny runs across him before they meet. Lance tries and tries, and when something works, he’ll beat it to death, and then onto the next like there’s always more laughs coming, if he just keeps throwing himself at the audience. He’s got real potential, and Vinny finally sees it emerge a bit when some heckler starts cussing and threatening Lance one night in the basement of some bar.
“You’re not fucking funny, you idiot! You’re just flopping around up there like a retard.”
Lance starts to pretend he is what he’s been called, saying, “I’m not retarded, Mister, I’ve got more IQs than I’ve got fingers and toes!”
He was playing to the rest of the audience, giving them credit for not being anything like this jerk even if they weren’t that entertained, and they laughed in gratitude at first. When the man felt the crowd turning on him and advanced to the stage to threaten Lance, the kid didn’t flinch or pull back. Talk about turn the other cheek, this guy turned belly up, became a total wet noodle, just lying on the stage wide-open to a gut-pound going, “How does a retard flop around, sir, since you’re the expert and not me. Like this?” He went up on a backwards crab and dropped himself on the floor again. “Like this?” and he start to wriggle back and forth like a snake. By the time he started doing The Worm, everyone else was applauding, and even the guy who came for him gave up, tried to pretend he’d been kidding, telling Lance he was a good sport and to keep working on the act. Lance shook his hand, his face nodding and awed and obsequious, and it stayed that way until he walked off-stage to where Vinny was leaning in the dark and watching him, which is when his face finally fell and he started wiping his hands off on his jacket over and over.
“Sweaty palms,” he says to Vinny and a couple of other people who had come to support him after they saw that debacle with a nasty heckler break out. Vinny had been watching the whole time. He finds this fellow fascinating.
The others flock to Lance and tell him he handled himself well, wow what workmanship, keeping cool under pressure, may we all be so capable when it happens to us, blah, blah, blah, and Lance no
ds and accepts every single bit of fluff they heap on him, and then he notices Vinny again, still leaning and still watching, taking it all in.
Lance looks at Vinny, says nothing but is clearly waiting for him to say his line, since everyone else has already gone. The rest of the group starts to look at Vinny too, and then look away because he’s being weird by not falling into the flappy gaggle with the rest of them. They all look away, but Lance waits; if he can wait out the heckler, he can wait for Vinny too, it seems.
“You’re goddamn hilarious,” Vinny finally tells him.
The others tsk and scoff, and one of them says, “Jesus, tell us what you really think, why don’t you? Don’t worry about him, Lance, you did great out there.”
Of course he did great out there—he didn’t get punched or break the bit, and he left with applause, that’s a win by anyone’s standards, but that’s not what Vinny’s talking about. He’s been watching Lance for a while, with that expressive face, and that go-for-broke, anything-for-a-laugh fire in him . . . he’s got it! He’s got that combination of will and ability that can really make it out of the pack.
Everyone else tries to snap Lance back to attention in their circle, but he won’t take his eyes off of Vinny; he knows what Vinny just told him was the biggest compliment at all, one he does not give lightly. In fact, Vinny admires this guy grudgingly, nearly jealously, because what are the odds that they’ve both got what it takes, huh? If Vinny’s come across a real talent at last, and he isn’t looking at his own self in the mirror when it happens, what does that mean? It means eventually he’ll end up in Steubenville again, telling stories at the bar while he drinks himself to a slow death, about how he knew the famous man on TV before he made it big, and no one will believe him. Why doesn’t he just give up right now?
Vinny doesn’t think he’s a quitter, he assumes that whatever else happened that night, he really would knock out all his teeth before going back to Ohio, but he can never know for sure, because Lance pushes through the others and comes up to him. He leans against the wall too, on one elbow with his hip stuck out like a flirtatious cartoon showgirl, and he says, “If I’m so hilarious, Big Boy, how come you ain’t laughing?”
