The Voiceover Artist (24 page)

Simon would only take so much mockery in my cartoonish impression of the voice he didn't have. The low limit of his patience for this routine gave me something to respect about him.

When he'd knocked me onto my back, Simon would press my cheek into the carpet with one hand and pummel my shoulder with the other. And I fought back, hard. I arched my back to break his pin, like I'd seen pro wrestlers do on TV, and drove my knees up and back, into his spine. I dug my nails into the hand on my face and whacked at his locked elbow with my balled-up fist. There was something in this combat that bound us together. I remember having this thought while he was punching me, and I was gouging him:
This says we mean something to each other. Brothers fight. Simon and I are brothers.

The moment I got the upper hand, I'd hit Simon as hard as I could until he threw me. After a while, I figured out that the way Simon fought—giving me a beating, and then taking one from me—was part of his sick fixation on making everything even-steven. I came to hate Simon's fucking fake draws. I didn't want to be even with him in anything. So I fought to win. Every time.

If she was home, our mother would charge in and break up our fights, grabbing by the arm whoever was on top and pulling him off. Then she'd stand us up, face to face.

“Apologize to your brother,” she'd say to me.

“Sorry,” I would say.

Then she'd look at Simon. “Apologize.”

Simon would fist-bump his chest, the gesture we'd all agreed, somewhere along the line, meant he was sorry.

But neither of us actually meant these apologies. We were already imagining our next floor battle, not payback and not a preemptive strike, just
what we did
with no more thought than we'd give to chewing our afterschool cookies.

Once, when I was about thirteen, I flipped Simon off of me before he was ready. He fell hard and hit his head on the leg of his desk chair. I punched at Simon's face with both fists, landing only a few blows between his forearms before our mother pulled me off and slapped me across the face. That fight—right through the slap—was the best moment of my life to that point. I had
won
. Even our mother could see it.

After my big win, neither of us threw a punch for years. We were still shitty to each other, though. I'd whistle “The Sound of Silence” at him, and he'd shake his head, mocking me, while I sat with our father watching ballgames that bored me. Most of the time, we left each other alone. I let Simon check his progress or lack of it against mine in any way he wasn't too ashamed to do it, while I paid almost no attention to his small successes and failures. By ignoring him, I was sending Simon a message: that he would never be as good as me in any category worth a damn.

In other words, by refusing Simon's fights, I kept winning.

Winning by not fighting was easy when things were going my way. When things were going badly, though, I'd feed my raw need to win the old-fashioned way. The night Simon introduced me to Brittany, I was taking every win I could. Even the wins that were losses.

 

•••

 

ERIKA WAS NOT
 the only good fortune I'd had since returning from Carbondale.

Raam Kersati was the big dog on the Chicago improv scene and, at a few years north of forty, its elder statesman, too. When I started taking improv classes back in
2006
, I'd doubted that Raam was as good as everyone said he was—
If he's still in Chicago,
I thought,
how good can he be?
Then I saw Raam's two-man show at the Improviso Theatre. Sixty minutes. A single scene. Every word improvised. Not one word wasted. Buzzed on bourbon and nearly exhausted from laughing, I wanted to buy Raam a drink and apologize for even
thinking
he was anything less than one of the best improvisers in the business. I kept just enough of my head to leave Raam the hell alone.

Four years later, a month before I visited Simon in Carbondale, I was doing a late-night set at Improviso for the twenty-or-so improv geeks and Cub fans sticking around until last call to watch me and a few other unknowns make shit up. Raam stepped onstage unannounced. I thought he was going to put a stop to our set right up until the moment he joined it.

I'd never been better than I was in the scenes I did with Raam. His characters were so real. He made it easy to find the true, which made it easy to find the funny. Raam was the kind of improviser who made everyone around him better without looking any worse himself. Standing next to Raam when the lights came up, feeling shockwaves of applause from a crowd that seemed to have doubled, I believed for just a moment that, even if I never made it to New York, I'd done something in comedy worth doing.

I'd heard the rumor that Raam had turned down several offers—including one, more than ten years before, from
Saturday Night Live
—because they'd refused to guarantee him creative control. At Improviso, Raam had all the control he wanted, so he played in primetime: a two-person show that sold out the
10
p.m. slot every Thursday. Raam's show had been on hiatus since his most recent scene partner, a woman named Sandra Keefe, moved to Los Angeles with a role in a Judd Apatow film. For Sandra's replacement, Raam had his pick of every improviser in Chicago.

He called me first, and I was ready.

To prepare for our opening, we improvised six fifty-minute scenes in a tiny room with no audience, learning each other's tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses. Then, on a Thursday night, billed as Raam and Connor, we opened to a sold-out crowd at Improviso. The reviews were raves, and the work was more satisfying than any I'd had. After years of drifting from bar to bar, performing for liquor, I'd landed in the best improv show in Chicago. I was a long way from
Saturday Night Live
, but I could see it from where I was standing on Raam Kersati's shoulders.

Raam and I were still doing afternoon sets to a hundred empty seats twice a week, creating characters no one would see and laugh lines no one would hear to make sure we killed every time we worked in front of an audience. It was one of these practice sessions that had pushed my meeting with Simon to a morning hour, before decent bars were serving. My neighborhood was long on dry cleaners and short on coffee shops, so I told Simon to meet me at the lakefront, just south of the nine-hole golf course at the north end of Lincoln Park, a half-mile from my apartment.

I'd settled on an outdoor meeting place without checking the weather forecast. It was July, and predictions made more than a day or two out aren't worth much in Chicago, anyway. But when I left my apartment late Tuesday morning, the sun was out and the temperature was perfect for a guy wearing a t-shirt and jeans. I imagined that, having lived my whole life in the Midwest, I'd developed a sixth sense that enabled me to predict weather conditions days in advance.

At Irving Park Road, I looked west for a bus that would get me to Lake Shore Drive before I could cover the three city blocks to the lakefront on foot. I saw no bus, but I did see dark gray clouds, their front edge forming a sharp line against the blue sky.
Some sixth fucking sense,
I thought. The wind and rain were on their way.

I walked across the softball fields to the tiered cement platforms—they looked like bleachers for giants—that passed for beach on this part of the shoreline. Simon wasn't there. I checked my phone. He hadn't called or texted. I sat down on the top platform and took in the blue expanse of Lake Michigan. Then I turned and faced the park. I didn't like the idea of Simon seeing me before I saw him.

I spotted Simon when he was still a long way off, walking alone across the softball fields with his head down. He may have been staring at the grass and clover in front of his feet, or just lowering his eyes out of the sunlight. I'd learned my brother's body language when it was the only language he had outside of a few made-up signs, but nothing in his posture or the steady pace of his steps gave me any clue about what Simon was meeting me to do or say. All the same, I couldn't shake the idea that he was ready to take from me what I'd taken from him.

I crossed the bike path and waited for Simon on the grass.

When he saw me, about twenty yards off, Simon raised his hand. I returned his wave. When he got closer, I put out my hand.

“How are you, brother?” I asked.

Simon shook my hand a little too firmly, like a guy trying to prove a point about his hand strength, as if
hand strength
would decide everything.

Then he did his little headshake and said, “I'm all right. How are you?”

“Fine.”

Simon nodded.

I gave him an opening to say whatever it was he had come here to say, hoping we could get into it quickly. But Simon said nothing. So I opened a hand toward the cement platform like it was the couch in my apartment.

“Have a seat,” I said.

We crossed the bike path and sat down, facing the water.

“I've never been here before,” he said.

“Lincoln Park?”

Simon shook his head. “To the lake.”

“This is your first time seeing Lake Michigan?”

“Yeah.”

It was a reminder of how small my brother's world had been when he couldn't speak. That smallness lingered like a hangover. Simon had been living in Chicago for six weeks, and I guessed he'd spent most of his time in his apartment.

We sat there another minute, looking out over the water.

“It's beautiful,” he said.

And it was. But by then, I didn't give a shit about beauty. I wanted to know why Simon had asked to see me. Just asking the question, though, was too blunt an approach, even for me, so I pussyfooted in that direction.

“So how are things, Simon?”

He shrugged and wiggled his head. “Not bad,” he said. “Considering.”

That word—
considering
—made me nervous. Considering what? Considering that he was still finding his way around a new city, or that his brother had fucked his girlfriend while he slept in the next room? After years of knowing what was on Simon's mind without his saying a word, I couldn't read him. It was as if his ability to speak was hiding his thoughts and feelings in a way his silence never had.

“So what have you been up to?” I asked. “Since you moved to the city.”

“Well,” Simon said, “I made a voiceover demo.”

“That's good.”

I waited for a follow-up that didn't come.
Is this some kind of fucking interview?
I wondered.
Am I going to have to yank every thought out of him?

“So how'd it turn out?” I asked.

“Pretty well,” Simon said, nodding.

He looked so pleased with his little achievement that I wanted to laugh. I managed to swallow that urge.

“Did you send the demo out?”

He wiggled his head. “To a few agencies, yeah.”

I nodded, leaving space for him to say something else. He didn't.

“Have you heard anything?” I asked, letting a little of exasperation into my voice.

“Yeah,” he said. “I have an agent now.”

“No shit,” I said, glad to be getting somewhere, finally. “What agency?”

“Skyline Talent,” Simon said, watching me.

What Simon probably saw was his younger brother looking impressed and anxious all at once. Skyline Talent was a top agency in Chicago. Actors who did their commercial work through Skyline did well. How did I know for sure? Skyline was
Erika's
agency. It's not like actors hang out at their agencies all the time, but it skeeved me out that Erika and Simon had a point of connection I couldn't control.

“That's a good agency,” I said.

Simon twisted his lips to the far side of his face and looked out over the lake again. He seemed to be fighting back a smile.

“They're doing pretty well for me so far,” he said.

“You got a gig already?”

He nodded. “I did a session yesterday.”

“That's fantastic,” I said.

“So are you the voice of Chicago Auto Wreckers now? Will I be passed out on the couch and hear your voice coming out of my TV at three in the morning?”

He shook his head. “It's a radio spot. For Red Bull. Seven markets.”

As he sat there watching me, waiting again for me to react to news of his success, I realized what our meeting was about: Simon was here to tell me how well he was doing and to see my face when he told me. It was his twisted even-steven thing. Nothing more. He didn't have a clue about what had happened with Brittany and me that night.

Right then, I could have lay back onto the concrete with my arms flung over my head and laughed with relief. But I didn't. Instead, I made an honest attempt to give my brother some of what I thought he'd come for.