Bright Lights and Summer Nights
I'm waitin for the bus, and I'm standin there and I'm thinkin about my aching arms and that if I have to wash pigs for a living I ain't never going to work for my father, “Iron Mike” Czycewski, again. He's gonna give me that speech about "makin' a living", and my grades "ain't so good," and I could "do worse than be in the family business." Tell me something, why should a kid who's just gonna be fourteen have to worry about making a living? It's summer and how many summers have I got? No school, no snow, no homework, no boots.
That guy over there, see him, second row behind the driver? I think he's a plumber. I get the chills when I look over at the plumber because of the way my dad makes me feel when I'm workin' for him. I guess everybody admires my dad. He always says what he thinks, he built his business up all by himself, he's honest, someone to “look up to,” and he makes me feel like a nobody. Truth is, when he talks to me, he looks right through me like there's a sign on the wall behind. I know he's not mean, he just never could figure out what to say to a kid. When we ride in his Plymouth, he just listens to “NEWS 1260” and we never say a word.
The same everybody who admires my dad says I'm really lucky. Here I am at thirteen working as an apprentice electrician - a trade - making money for college. I'm not sure I even want to go to college
This bus took me to the job this morning. A really smelly, dirty place where they make metal bedframes (I got fingerprints on my sandwich at lunch) and I drilled some holes. When my father showed up, he called in all the trades: drywallers, plasterers, carpenters and plumbers to look at the holes - how crooked they were. They sure all had a great, big laugh.
How about the time he caught me lying on the floor puttin' in plugs? "A good `lectrician don't lie down on the job," says “Iron Mike”.
Here's my stop and I'll be lucky if I don't fall on my canister when I get off. He say's I'm clumsy, that I never finish anything I start. They all say it.
I'm thinkin' that maybe this weekend I'll get on my bike and just ride. Maybe I'll come to a place where they have some use for a clumsy apprentice electrician who likes movies and once in a while bowls over 110.
On route eight, that's old Northfield Road, there's a summer theater in a tent. It's a big concrete circle, and all winter long it looks like a buried gas tank. But in the summer - well the tent - red and orange and blue stripes - goes up. The plywood boards come off the box office and the signs: "$3.50 - $5.00 TOP!" "OPENING MAY 25" "Suzanne Somers in 'Carousel'."
I like to sit here across the street at the BP station and watch the people run around that place. Dancers who walk like geese, people carrying scenery, trucks backing up and loading and unloading and loading and unloading. There's music sometimes, and singing, and I can just hear the dancers grunting and hollering "Ooooooh," and "Hey," and "Yeah." Are they supposed to do that?
You know, I can see some kids there my age. I know they work there, I see them carryin' things all the time. I wonder if I could work there? God knows I'd do anything to get close to Suzanne Somers. (I'm savin' up for a Buttmaster.)
Hey it's another spiffy Saturday night. I ain't got enough money to go to the movies, Mom's putting paper on the kitchen shelves, my sister Laura, the perfect, has got a date, la-da, and my father is almost watching the tribe, a night game on TV in between telephone calls about this job and that job. I wonder if I should tell him about the theater. Forget it. He'd laugh me all the way to Lodi.
My pal Howard and I are having a piece of pizza and sharing a liter of A&W at Barbachickaribandpizza. Howard got thrown outta' scout camp for biting a counselor during karate practice. Now he's got the whole summer to sleep `till noon every day.
We decide to bike out to the theater. There's a, well, like a nose cone at the top of the tent all blaring with white light. It sends streamers into the sky. The whole tent is glowing, and the orchestra music is so loud it vibrates your stomach. It gives me chills - not plumber chills, but a different kind of chills.
Normally I don't do this kind of stuff, and I don't blame Howard for chickening out, but I haven't got $3.50, $5.00 tops, and I just gotta peek at what's going on in there.
I cut through the parking lot, past the ticket-persons who are watching the show through the main tent-flap. Suddenly, the lights go out, there's a big explosion of clapping and whistles, and I slip through a hole where the light cables go in.
There must be a thousand people inside the tent, sitting all around the stage. The action down there kicks up some dust which makes the zillion lights look like lasers. Everyone down on that stage is dancing and singing and acting really hard. They're sweating. I can see it even from this distance.
And it's dark again. No, not just dark, it's black, and the audience is applauding, and almost as soon as I hear the footsteps, they're on top of me - from both sides, and I'm run over, crushed by what seems like fifty people in the dark. They're carryin' pieces of scenery and some smell like my mother's make-up. Crash! I think I've been murdered!
I'm laying on this army cot, takin inventory of my vital organs. I can hear someone say, "He was in the aisle during a scene change." I think I am missing part of my liver.
Mr. Tino DaCost is the owner (Do they say "Producer?”) of this theater, and he offers me a complimentary ticket to another night's show, since I missed a lot of this one. Clumsy old me doesn't tell him I snuck in.
Tino talks funny. Well, not "funny," but what my family would call "theatrical." He says what everybody else says, but his voice goes up and down. Like the Pope.
When he leaves, I look around. No liver parts. "What the hey?" I tell myself, and I go off after him. I got this idea, you know, like when the Roadrunner gets hit on the head with a hammer and he has this “light bulb” - an idea that's crazy, but “might just work.” I catch up with Mr. DaCost in a little trailer behind the ticket booth. He's countin' money, and I notice he has about ten diamond rings, and a silk shirt with a big collar like you see on TV when Jerry Lewis does his show from Las Vegas.
"Mr. DaCost?"
"What?"
"I was wondering...."
"Good. Come in, sit down, young Jack Czycewski, is it?"
"Jack, yes. I was wondering if, well, if you might, y'know… have a job for me?"
He stops counting.
"I see, said Mr. Toad," He says, looking up from his rolls of quarters. My heart speeds up to 500. He adds:
"Sorry, but I have all the supernumeraries I require.”
(Whatever that means) “Thought so,” I reply, “Thanks anyway.” I head for the door, draggin' my shattered and abused leg and grimacin' with pain and anguish.
Through the crack of my eye, I can see him lookin' at me with his wrinkled face all feelin' sorry for me.
“If I employed everyone who asked, I'd be up to my tush in Phantoms and Evitas. What skill do you have, what can you do, that would entice Mr. Tino DaCost to hire you, Young Jack,?"
I stop. The first thing that comes into my mind is:
"I see you got a lotta lights and cables. I'm a `lectrician."
Now that got his attention.
He sends me to see the scenic designer, Leona Meyer. I find her workin' away in another trailer. She's drawing the sets and lights and costumes for the next show. She seems to be in charge of everything people do around here. I like her right away because she's so excited about everything. Every drawing she shows me, every picture on the wall. She's truly happy doing what she's doing and that's a lot different from the whining I've been hearing. Right off, I know she likes me, and it makes me want to work for her. She pushes a bunch of books and stuff off a folding chair and reaches up on a high shelf for some lighting equipment catalogs.
“Here, look through these lighting equipment catalogs. I'll be right back.”
She sits me down and floats out the door. Wow. Stage lighting equipment is really nifty. It looks really official!
When she comes back, she takes a catalog out of my hands. “Point to an ellipsoidal spot,” she says, “How many watts?”
(She knows her potatoes.) “There, 750,” I shout.
I have a job - apprentice!
"My father will never believe this, Mr. DaCost."
He just smiles.
"Could you write him a letter -- you know, that you gave me a job?"
Without another word, but with a big swoop he takes out this sheet of paper with a picture of the tent on it, and he types out this letter at about a hundred miles an hour. It says that he's giving me this job as an apprentice at his theater for the whole summer ("If he proves himself capable") and I am to earn forty dollars a week (less deductions) and "who knows" perhaps "you may see your son on stage with David Carradine in 'Mr. Roberts.'"
"Best regards,
Tino DaCost
Producer."
Before I leave, I have to be approved by Mr. DaCost's canary, Belasco. (A smelly, noisy, flea-bitten bird if you ask me.)
My mother is amazed that I did it on my own, and my father is so mad his face is bright red, like the Hunt's Tomato Man. “That kinda' dough, there, that's not even minimum wage.”
I know that later they will "discuss" my job. My father will bring up the moral and economical problems ("…and, incidentally, his future. I don't want him workin' with the tools all his life like me.") I hope my mother will be on my side. It's funny, my dad ain't talkin' to me, and even though we never talk anyway, I know it.
In the morning, I'm still in bed when I hear the toilet flush, the door slam and him openin' the garage doors. He's goin' to work and I'm not goin' with him. I duck when he looks up at my window.
My first step onto the stage of the theater is into a bucket of green paint with a new, white tennis shoe. It is with this single green and single white foot that I am introduced to my fellow apprentices, each with a unique talent. Jerry wants to be a dancer, he's very cool. He even carries paint cans and clothes on a hanger in rhythm. When he hangs up the clothes he spins around.
One of the apprentices is Anne, an artist and painter, who's an elderly twenty-two. She seems to know everything, and she lives in New York where she's been havin' a lot of trouble getting work. Jeez, after six months, you'd think she'd give up. But no. Here she is. Anne has short, black, black hair, like Winona Ryder, and she always has a sweater tied around her waist because she says she's touchy about her thighs. (Imagine someone telling me that?)
Then there are the duck-walking dancers, the resident company of actors, the singers, the orchestra, the union stagehands, the front-of-house people, etc.
Doing the lights will be just a part of my duties, I'll help with the sets and costumes, and maybe, maybe, Mr. DaCost will give me a small part. That's what every apprentice is livin' for!
Each morning at call time, yawning and sleepy, we take a forty-minute ride out to Yankee Lake in the back of a pickup truck, singing and laughing. Everybody is very funny and no one cares if you got a weird name, or pimples, or can't catch a baseball.
We build our sets in a rented barn on route 422. We have to keep the cows from chewing on the muslin we use to make “flats”.
Anne shows me how to build flats and how to do this and that, and what books to read like Burris, Meyer and Cole's Scenery for the Theater. I wire up light fixtures, zip along with the Skil saw, and, guess what? I'm positively GRACEFUL!
Old, clumsy me, who can't finish anything.
When the temperature hits a hundred, Anne and I walk over to a farm where the farmer sells iced, homemade apple cider. I think I'm in love with her.
In spite of a hundred grillion mosquitos, we all wade into Yankee Lake. The bottom is squishy, but the water is cool and we have a giant water fight. We end up totally covered with mud.
The theater changes shows every week. It's a lot of work, and our only time off is a few hours Sunday morning before the matinee. After the Sunday night performance, we strike the sets. That takes all night, then we put up the new sets just in time for rehearsal Monday night. After the rehearsal, we run the scene changes a couple of times (Up and down the aisles, falling all over each other and laughing like punchy Hyenas.) Tuesday morning, Orchestra rehearsal. Open Tuesday night.
The long hours mean that I don't get home much, and I miss dinner a lot. I think my mother is worried that I'm not getting enough to eat, and I'm getting too skinny (imagine that!)
My father shows up during one of the punchiest, most clumsy scene changes, and just asks what time I'll be home. I think he's suspicious. He's always talking about people being “taken” by “big-time operators.” Why would someone work all them hours for a lousy forty bucks? His eyes disapprove, and neither of us can talk about it. I watch his crumpled pants move toward his truck and I'm thinkin' that he's mad about having to make this stop between his jobs. It's devastating. I think Anne sees it, too, and that makes it worse.
I am summoned to Mr. DaCost's office.
I think Anne had something to do with this.
He gives me a part in a show! Anne urges me to invite my parents, but she really doesn't have to do it, I want them to come. I want them to see me. I guess it's corny but I want them to see me get the applause from the audience, to see the way they treat me here. Like a real, grown-up person.
My mother seems excited about it when I tell her on the phone, but she says that my father's got a big job going and it doesn't even look like she'll be able to get him to Grandma's for the usual Friday night soup-and-tongue dinner. She says she'll try but "You know your father." Do I ever.
Mom and Pop been fightin' about almost everything these days. Business ain't so good, and havin' teenagers is expensive. They fight about stuff that they're not really fightin' about… know what I mean? I once saw some poems my Pop wrote around the time I was a baby. I wonder what happened to the poet inside him?
The show is “Threepenny Opera,” and I'm the mounted messenger who merely saves the show by granting an amnesty, and freeing Mack the Knife played by the unbelievably tanned and thin Alan Thicke. My line is: "The king has decreed...." etc. My cue is the chorus singing "The mounted messenger riding comes." My costume has a cardboard horse attached. When I hear the music I still get the chills.
I've watched the crowd from as close as I can get with my horse on, and I don't see my folks. They're not there! I can tell you it really hurts, and after the third time the chorus has sung "The mounted messenger...." Anne has pushed me down the aisle. The spotlight jumps on me like a mugger, and in its glare, I can't see any faces in the audience. I stumble on the steps of the stage, and bend the horse's neck, I lose the scroll I'm supposed to read from, and the feather in my hat pokes Alan Thicke in the eye.
In spite of all this, and with help from the rest of the cast, I manage to deliver the decree.
After the audience files out, I'm afraid I'm gonna cry. I'm just as clumsy as ever. The costume, make-up and chatter doesn't really serve to cover up what I really am…
There's the autograph table, and I'll be doggoned if I don't see my mother and father getting Alan Thicke's autograph!
He's rubbing his eye, and right in front of them he says to me:
"You were very good in your part."
Gosh.
The other apprentices, and my new friends seem to know, and they say something, too. Tino DaCost promises me a bigger part next time. Boy. My Mom is beaming. My Dad's face is still stony. Anne's there, too, and she watches.
As we walk to the car, my father (who's always been a man of few words and said exactly what's on his mind) says:
"The king has decreed...." He pats me on the shoulder and heads toward the Plymouth. Laura is sitting in the back seat, looking very prim and bored.
“He wants me to give you this,” my Mom says, and she pushes a twenty dollar bill in my hand. When I look over at him, holding the door of the Plymouth, with that look on his face - maybe a little less hard, now - I think this is really something - it's his way of treating me like a grown-up.
When we get into the car, he says: “Well, Mr. Hume Chromium, how's about you treat us all to some ice cream?”
That's my Pop!
THE END
(© 1996 Harvey Laidman)