The Lyricist

By Robert Emmett Maddock

In his debut novel, author Robert Emmett Maddock has built a rollercoaster of a story—and the ultimate showbiz odyssey—making way for an ill-starred underdog in the precarious realms of New York City theatre.

Oliver Pyke is starting to worry. All he wants is to write lyrics for Broadway musicals, but after years of trying to make it in New York City, the dream has eluded him. Things change when Oliver meets an uptown piano player named Sam Arkwright from one of the wealthiest families in Manhattan. Joining forces, they write their first song together; and their collaboration is born. But can it survive? Soon, the writers plunge headlong into an outré world of fast-moving dealmakers, career-driven divas, stagehands, dramatists and every formation of hellbent thespian. The future looks promising, but all that glitters isn’t gold; and if Oliver Pyke can’t break into show business, he might just break altogether. Inhabited by a vivid society of show people, THE LYRICIST comes to a startling finale that whittles the American dream to the bone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Emmett Maddock
• Release date: Mar 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005113209

Robert Emmett Maddock

ROBERT EMMETT MADDOCK is a novelist and a poet. He worked as a journalist for the Ke Alaka’i newspaper in Hawaii before moving to New York City in 1999. Winner of a Daryl Roth Award and a Jonathan Larson Grant, Maddock has written lyrics for songs performed throughout Manhattan, including the NAMT songwriters showcase and the Bound-for-Broadway concert series at the Kaufman Music Center. He is married to Melanie Maddock. The couple live with their two Chihuahuas: Zeus and Pablo.

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Chapter 1

Hudson Press, New York City

June 8, 2004

LINCOLN CENTER SHOOTING

An ex-convict armed with an unregistered handgun killed seven students on Monday inside of the Asian Heritage School of Communication before adding himself to the death toll. Pedestrians near the shooting in Lincoln Center were ordered to take shelter before the gunman was confirmed dead, said Police Lt. Ron Sheehan. One other victim remains in life-threatening condition.

***

Friday, September 3, 2004

Every morning I pass other dog walkers, most of them as ordinary-looking as myself—except for this one guy. Conducting a couple of young dalmatians up and down MacDougal Street, he wears combat boots and the national flag of Macedonia stitched into a bikini bottom. Completely fearless, this wild man parades his pups like he’s on a runway during Fashion Week in the red-light district of Xanadu. I’m a pale zilch compared to him. Walking people’s dogs for fifteen dollars an hour can be a hip livelihood in New York City, but without the right look it’s not so provocative. Instead of cool vulgarity, I sport styleless blahs—not to mention a shock of blazing red hair that’s off the ginger scale.

All the people whose dogs I walk, sensible city folks on the go, have given me copies of their apartment keys. While most of these men and women don’t even remember my name, they let me into their homes with no signs of mistrust. We redheads might all be a little crazy, but most of us aren’t full-blown crackpots or pariahs. Apparently, I possess the outward traits of a harmless guy—and I may seem reasonably trustworthy; but if anyone ever cares to do a background check, they’ll find that in 1993 I swiped a pair of swimming goggles from a hick town drugstore in Missouri. The offense was a piddling misdemeanor and I was only thirteen at the time, but those ass-headed cops in the Ozarks probably still have the crime on record in their tornado-battered filing system. Even so, I’m no thief on the whole. For the most part I’m honest. Dependability and loyalty are my strong points; and the dogs themselves would tell you that I’m principled.

My route begins at 6:30 a.m. with two Chihuahuas named Pilgrim and Lulu. I pick them up from an alcoholic esthetician who thinks it’s okay to pay me in citrus masks and herbal exfoliants. Seldom veering from the drill, we cross through Washington Square Park beneath the colossal arch that commemorates the pomposity of marble. From there, I fetch an overweight boxer named Butt-Kiss on 5th Avenue—owned by a stingy theology professor whose breath could peel wallpaper. With three dogs in tow, I hike up to East 8th Street to obtain a goldendoodle named Fuffles and a beagle who goes by Ziggy. By now I have to adjust my sweatpants since the keys and various other things in my pockets inevitably wriggle down to my crotch and become vexingly askew. If I’m not careful here I’ll mummify myself in leashes and lose my temper and probably mess up the synergy between me and this traveling mass of paws. Next on the path, I make way for Greene Street where I gain an oversexed collie named Justice and a mutt called Goliath. After that, I pick up two indistinguishable shorkie tzu siblings named Elmo and Sputnik. That’s a grand total of nine dogs, all of them panting in the taxicab fumes along Waverly Place. If all is going nicely and the pack is cooperating with the urban flow, I find a rhythm and make the sidewalk my easy thruway.

The shooting was almost three months ago and for a while I was very skittish. When anything popped or went off too suddenly, I’d jump back like it was a guerilla air raid. I’d freak out at the metallic rattling sound of cars going over unsecured manholes, to say nothing of the airborne skateboarder hitting the sidewalk two feet behind me. Everything was a gunman, but I reckon I’m doing better. A storefront gate slams open and I barely react. Morning, Oliver! shouts a Puerto Rican florist, his shop window lined with potfuls of reddish azaleas. The dogs like this guy—ever since he threw them a handful of Milk-Bones back in January.

Hey man! I can never remember his name.

Mirrored in the multistory windows of the Bobst Library, I’m like some dutiful roamer presiding over an octopus-shaped cloud made of miscellaneous foxes and wolves. Tethered to my herd of assorted bitches, I tug on their reins and use plastic baggies to pick up the turds they bequeath to the concrete. The Bobst Library—I’ll never stop noticing—is beset with grim vibes. Last year two students died via suicide in this edifice by plummeting headlong from one of the uppermost stories, down onto the tile-floored lobby of the place. Since then, the morbidity of this library is flabbergasting to me. Imagine standing in line to check out Pride and Prejudice or The Essays of Emerson—only to trip over some NYU student’s bone-tangled anatomy. It gives me the absolute creeps.

While walking this number of dogs it’s impossible to scoot, unnoticed, past the flirtiest bag lady in the Village. She’s an elderly, bow-legged troublemaker named Bree Katwaroo—known for accosting pedestrians on West 4th Street. Oliver Patrick Pyke! She sings my whole entire name and wiggles her forefinger in a come-gimme-a-kiss-me gesture. Ya got any money? The Trinidadian trickster thinks I’m a credit union. Hey, love! Don’t walk away from me!

Sorry, Bree. I hurry past her because if you stop in front of bow-legged Bree for a split second, she’ll fondle your ass in search of your wallet. She got ahold of mine once, only to learn my full name by reading my old Missouri State driver’s license. Beware of Bree, that sticky hellcat.

By 9:30, my last round of pooches is back in their apartments and I’ve got half an hour to get to my second job. This one’s in a soup kitchen on Greenwich Street in the basement of a one-time Presbyterian church. It took me six months of work here as a volunteer before they promoted me to the midday assistant supervisor and began paying me minimum wage. Duty-wise, I wipe down tables and scrub burnt food off the bottoms of steel cooking vats when I’m not making rounds with a questionnaire form—asking mentally disordered hobos to rate the free service: Was the meal healthful? Were you provided with clean utensils? Once completed, the forms go to the mayor’s office, or some such mucky-mucky before they’re filed with the NYC Bureau of No-One-Gives-A-Shit, secretly located in the Statue of Liberty’s rusted womb.

I work in the soup kitchen for four and a half hours.

As soon as my shift is over, I exit through the stairwell that leads to the defunct chapel, which can’t be bypassed whether one is leaving the soup kitchen or coming down into it. Halfway up the steps, I’m met by an ill-groomed and fully bearded schizophrenic named Joe Kozac who blocks my passage. Hey, Coppertop. You want a piece of New York? I got some natty fashion right here, man. Plenty of homeless people are schizophrenic, but Joe Kozac’s case is infamous since he’s blowing his stack one minute—and then he’s trying to sell you a kitten. This time it’s not a kitten; it’s a fabric purse. It’s a satchel, says Joe. Me and a couple of the guys on 7th Avenue found this humongous black curtain, all rolled up next to a dumpster behind Carnegie Hall. By some means the bums gained access to a sewing machine and now they’re making shoulder bags out of the discarded drape to sell to tourists—and fools like me. Joe loops the strap over my head, which crosses my chest diagonally. The satchel rests on my left hip—a hanging black square with a V flap and a nondescript look. I sort of like the shabby thing. I genuinely do, to tell the truth.

How much do you want for it?

Oh, jeez. Joe looks embarrassed. I don’t know, man. That’s a tough call. He taps his forehead a million times. "You’d really buy this—for real?"

Why not? I jerk the seam. It’s well-built. It’s original.

All his manic ticks come out and it looks like he’s going to puke bees. Okay man, but I gotta warn you; this was made by skeevy vagrants!

So what? I say while patting his arm. I don’t have anything against skeevy vagrants. What’s your asking price?

A teardrop, big enough to lodge five dolphins, falls out of Joe Kozac’s right eye; and he hugs me so appreciatively that I get a taste of his vinegary beard. Even his sideburns are up in my face—wiry tufts of man-fuzz that probably haven’t been shampooed since 1985. You’re a good man, Coppertop. He insists that I keep the satchel for a while and that we’ll settle on a price in a day or two. Stinkin’ weirdo, this guy. Normally, I don’t buy things off of resourceful street persons; but it’s hard to say no to Joe.

At the top of the stairwell I empty the contents of my pockets and transfer everything into this floppy pouch I’ve just acquired. My life’s random bits and pieces are what you’ll find embedded in the asphalt if I ever get run over by a steamroller: my cellphone, three cherry-flavored cough drops, my wallet (holding my MetroCard), all those aforesaid keys, a receipt from C.O. Bigelow’s pharmacy, some loose change and a pewter money clip that I found on Varick Street. I realize that’s not exciting stuff, but at least I’m not that woman from Cambria Heights who toted around her dead baby in an oversized handbag. She did that for five years, never once drawing suspicion before the police arrested her for failure to properly dispose of human remains. I read all about it in the Village Voice.

***

The hurry to my next job is a high-stress hopscotch that I dare stuntmen and gladiators to undertake. In order to be on time, I have to be riding a local train on the subway’s blue line no later than 2:50. Once I’m off the train, I hightail it over to my gym on 9th Avenue and 56th Street where I rent a locker that stores my dress pants, a spit-shined pair of secondhand brogues, clean socks, deodorant and a stash of button-up shirts for the switcheroo I undergo between soup kitchen drudge and respectable English teacher. At 4:00 my students are expecting me at a private school on 61st Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Moving quickly from Hell’s Kitchen to Lincoln Center, I know every slope in the pavement and when this carrot-mopped go-getter is heading lickety-split uptown, even the bravest of pigeons get out of my way.

This is my highest paying job and the only job I’m proud enough of to tell my parents about. I teach on the second floor of the Asian Heritage School of Communication. The building is a fully windowed cube fronted by international flags. As private English schools go, it’s been globally recognized for empowering Asians with American language skills since 1973. In the entryway, an optically boggling set of white lamps hover like origami supernovas above a wide mural. Last June, these fixtures were basted in death. I still think about the bits of bloody hair and skull fragments I saw dribble down the shocking blot where the gunman’s head went kablooey on the artwork. The mural depicts a rippled spring filled with koi carp. After the shooting, the school’s trustees flew the artist in from Bangkok to chisel the gore out of the acrylic. Despite its restoration, for me the mural provokes a flashback of carnage. Close to being late now, I hurry past it and slide into an elevator.

My students advance to the next class every eight weeks. At the moment I have twelve students. Four of them are Japanese, four Chinese, one Laotian, one Guamanian and two Koreans. I’m guilty of doting on some of the girls, especially a coquettish pair named Midori and Fumika. When they laugh at my dim jokes, the world turns into a joy-spouting lotus blossom and I’m high on their Japanese glee for about fifteen seconds. Feeling the line weaken between my libido and professionalism, I wish I could score a bubble bath with these girls instead of lecturing them on the difference between peek, peak and pique.

During our class’s ten-minute break, a weaselly supervisor stands in my doorway and observes that I’m not attired in the requisite noose. He says my name with a scolding priggishness; and I know exactly what’s coming. Mister Pyke, see if you can guess what I’m going to say to you next.

Necktie. I know. Don’t worry, I’ll have one by Monday. I promise.

Ever since the school president revamped the dress code, her staunch underlings have been screaming necktie! at me as if I’m naked unless I wrap a silk rag around my throat. Part of me wants to fight the wardrobe patrol and come to work in open-shirted mutiny, but I can’t afford to make waves. The thing about this job is that I got it by luck and a lazy staffing recruiter who ignored the shortcomings on my résumé. That’s why I try to conform to the school’s nitpicking guidelines—so that nobody digs up my lack of credentials and calls my employment into question. Be that as it may, I’m actually a pretty good English teacher.

Mothered and fathered by stumblebums in the most ass-backward part of the country where folks say dudn’t and edumacated, I decided a long time ago that I would speak my native tongue like a civilized American instead of a rube. Such being the case, when one of my students comes in and says that he’s late because of the very much traffics, this error doesn’t sneak over me.

Immediately, we revisit noncount nouns—verbalized in complete sentences. For the stumped learner I offer repeated encouragement, but I have news for the sore grumbler who thinks I’m the one making up the rules. Listen, guys and dolls. Don’t blame me if you don’t like the ins-and-outs of English. Blame the Anglo-Saxons and the Jutes. That always goes over their heads, but I’m not really a hard-ass. Learning a language is like learning to drive, I tell my class. Think of English as a Ford Mustang. It’s not a bad analogy, really. From turbine to tailpipe, the English language is an over-engineered gas guzzler—equipped with shocks and struts, automated cruise control, emergency breaks, persuasive getaway functions and enough power to drive to any of the windy deceits. Become fluent and disappear into the talky hubbub of American life!

As soon as my class lets out at 6:00, I shake it down to 53rd Street and chug a mimosa float at Smorenberg’s—the only eatery in town that whips up homemade fizzy drinks and year-round eggnogs. It would seem like I’m minding my own business on a swiveling barstool, but I’m constantly eavesdropping here—scavenging the restaurant’s lively talk for a snippet of something crass or comical. "Say what you will, Harold, but that ‘belligerent slut’ is our daughter!" The quivering ninny making this racket looks like a bald hamster; and the checkered vest across from her has a prickly old man in it. Before they look my way, I avert my gaze and laugh so hard, I nearly dislocate my trachea.

***

Bumping from job to job, I feel like a clobbered pinball in the electrified machinery of perpetual Manhattan. Nighttime sees me working as well. It’d be a real shame if I didn’t have at least one glamorous source of income; and here’s the closest I’ve come to my real purpose in New York. Tuesdays through Fridays, my 7:00 p.m. job has me tagging checked-in articles at the cloak room of the Broadway Theatre—way up in the northernmost part of the city’s razzle-dazzle playhouse territory. It’s the only Broadway theatre (out of more than forty of them) that bears the name of Broadway itself.

I enter through an employees-only side door before the venue brims over with freckly brats on cellphones and plump-bottomed vacationers in plastic visors and clumsy Nikes. It’s not without its challenges, working as an attendant in a cloak room. For one thing, the items people bring into the theatre—other than cloaks—could be anything short of a caged mongoose. During my shifts, I stay busy alongside a durable Brooklynite named Maya DeLille. Maya doesn’t put up with anybody’s guff. She speaks plainly; and I try to follow her lead. What I like about her, though we’re not really friends, is that Maya will intercede if I’m having an altercation with some whiney, Long Island terror who claims I’ve squished her ninety-dollar cake. Don’t bring cake into a theatre, ma’am. Advice for life. Maya specializes in these kinds of brusque verdicts—perhaps an inborn feature of her test-me-not attitude that goes back to her Creole slave roots.

Thirty minutes before the curtain rises, Maya and I have our work cut out for us. Behind the counter, we assist the incoming patrons who present us with items too cumbersome or unwieldy to bring to their seats. Mostly we check in heavy jackets, coats and parkas; but we’ve handled capes and canes, all kinds of ridiculous hats, luggage sets, duffle bags, portable oxygen tanks, muffs, shawls, purses, briefcases, drippy umbrellas and even a vase full of calla lilies. One time we checked in a seven-foot teddy bear for a Paraguayan ambassador who’d been out shopping with his daughter at FAO Schwarz. Despite all these screwy allowances, we draw the line at Italian leftovers since too many servings of baked ziti have oozed through Styrofoam takeout boxes; and when pesto sauce touches a mink stole, not even Rudy Giuliani can appease the crisis.

Although the job can be daunting, it’s a dreamful place to be employed. Dreamful, I can’t think of a better word for it. It’s a theatre after all, even a star-dusty pillar of Broadway wonderworks. Back in the 1920s, this was a favorite venue for picture shows where audiences had their first brush with Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willy. In the 1930s, the auditorium was rebuilt to facilitate staged musical productions; and today the place is fitted with 1,765 seats. It’s past its prime, this temple of footlights and cardboard moons, but the Broadway Theatre is no shit box. Twice renovated since its majesty days, the chandeliers alone still bring out the swoon in every awestruck visitor.

Standing in the cloak room, I always know when the show’s about to begin because my insides get all topsy-tingly and I feel a warm light expanding in my chest. It’s uncanny, all this visceral anticipation. Then when the overture swells with its bold fantasia coursing up the theatre’s red velvet halls, it’s like heaven is right here in the building. Once Maya’s okay with it, I jump out of the cloak room, hurry upstairs and take a seat on the rear mezzanine. I know all the ushers; and none of them mind if I sneak-watch the opening number of any production we’re housing—as long as there’s an open seat. Presently, we’re putting on Bombay Dreams. The showiest of shows, it follows a hammy pauper in a silly rags-to-riches plot that glitters insanely for two hours and flunks to the max (in some reviews). But I treasure every tacky second of it.

***

What lured this redheaded lamb out of Missouri wasn’t just a longing for citified delights. I’ve taken my turn gawking in front of the windows at Tiffany’s, but I didn’t come to New York to look at engagement rings. I reckon I enlisted in the bedlam of NYC for one central reason; and it’s nothing that hasn’t enticed a vast line of hopefuls before me. It’s not a touristy endeavor. And it isn’t for the Beaux-Arts architecture coupled with the aroma of warm challah bread floating out of a kosher deli. I didn’t come to New York to see a Kandinsky in the MoMA or to pay my respects at the gravesite of Herman Melville—or for an internship at Google. Nor am I here for the Yankees or the Mets or some outré religious movement that’s won my soul in this titanium dreamland of skyscrapers and subcultures. My purpose here is pure and simple. Wooed by New York’s immortal spirit, I arrived in the city with my favorite pen aimed like a divining rod at that theatre-lined path called Broadway. Unquestionably, it’s the musicals that beckoned me eastward. What I’m drawn to, more than anything else, is the witty and heartbreaking ado that plays out on a New-York-City stage.

I was in fourth grade when a bouncy troupe of actors from Kansas City rolled into Neosho, Missouri and spent two days putting on Little Shop of Horrors in my school’s cafeteria. They performed the first act on a Monday and returned the next day for act two, but I missed the second part of the show since I had a fever and my mother wouldn’t let me out the door. That night, my best friend, Wade Thordsen, told me everything I’d missed—describing the carnivorous, lip-smacking houseplant that ends up digesting half the musical’s cast. I pretended not to care, but I would’ve traded my BB gun to bear witness to that finale.

In Junior High I signed up to be a stagehand for a school production of the musical Oliver!, which had over forty Missourian teenagers practicing British accents. Due to an overzealous push to advertise the show, promotional flyers popped up on nearly all of Neosho’s public surfaces: brick walls, lampposts, park benches and the town’s most influential bulletin board at Verne’s Supermarket. All over town, Oliver! was happening in a big way; and when I shut my eyes at night, I saw those flyers with my name on them followed by that strong-willed exclamation mark; and it seemed like God and the universe and everything inside of me was demanding that I grab onto this thing called Musical Theatre.

From then on, I began checking out cast albums from the Birch Spring Public Library—renewing the vinyl record of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat six times in a single summer. Mrs. Dunn, the head librarian, praised my fondness for the arts, though I made her swear not to yap about it since I’d overheard my father say that too many show tunes can turn a boy into a dancing rose petal. Back then, I’d already pushed my father’s buttons by checking out The Illustrated Guide to the Decorative Arts as well as the biography of an opera singer named Gaspare Pacchierotti who’d been castrated in the 1700s in order to preserve his girlish singing voice. I also studied Greek myths and neoclassicism; and I especially loved atlases. As scruffy and uncoordinated as I was with my tattered overalls and my tousled red hair, I knew the meaning of bon vivant. In the olden days, when my father was a grubby little scamp down in Sugarloaf, Arkansas, he kept a slingshot in his back pocket. Unlike him, I carried around cologne samples—torn from library issues of GQ and Esquire. My family could never afford to subscribe to those magazines, but despite my lack of personal pulchritude, I was a savant of good taste. Cultivating a love of books, I kept tabs on worlds far snazzier than my own; and at least I was literate. I don’t think my dad’s read anything in the past twenty years—outside of stop signs and bourbon labels.

Eventually, it wasn’t enough to just listen to Broadway recordings. The lyricist in me came to life when I gave myself the task of writing new verses for songs like Ease on Down the Road from The Wiz and Something’s Coming from West Side Story. I must’ve drained a hundred felt-tip pens by writing new lyrics for old songs. While Wade Thordsen and other pals of mine were out tormenting cows and pissing in ditches, I created my first original rhyme scheme and jotted lines for melodies that hadn’t already been composed by Charlie Smalls or Leonard Bernstein. In love with the words, I never sought music lessons or considered learning to play an instrument. One time I plunked around on a muddy Wurlitzer in a junkyard up the road from my family’s house, but it was never the music so much as the words that I longed to devise and develop.

When I was seventeen, a local violinist heard that I was writing lyrics and asked for a sample of my writing—just to see if my words suited his fiddling. The violinist was much older than me and a bit stuck-up since he’d toured once with the Union Parish Orchestra. What I gave him was the strongest lyric I’d ever written, titled Thunder Love. I’d penned it for Rizzo to sing to Kenickie, if there was room for such a moment in the musical Grease. The lyric, in my opinion, had a promising chorus: Thunder love! Make it start. Rev the engine of my heart. But the violinist entombed my words in a dull arrangement. This isn’t right, I protested. "How’s anyone supposed to get a kick out of this? It’s meant to be an upbeat love song, not a lament for the dead. It’s not a dirge!" We argued back and forth until we agreed to disagree. A month later, without my consent, the violinist entered our song in an annual songwriting competition and had it sung by his bucktoothed cousin at a hokey venue in Branson. One of the competition’s judges, who also worked as a movie critic for the Stone County Reminder, decided that Thunder Love fell short on thunder. The song was awarded a green Nice Try ribbon—a consolation so insulting, I punched a hole in my bedroom wall and drank a bottle of my dad’s giggle water while cussing on the floor next to my record player. Needless to say, I quit collaborating with the violinist on the grounds that his artistic palette lacked the right oomph for my lyrics.

Next, I collaborated with a pianist by the name of Cody Marmo from Leawood. Cody was my age; and he wasn’t ambitious, but he was reliable. And he set my lyrics to tunes that were up to snuff. My problem with Cody was that there was no dream in him. Every time I suggested we move to New York City after graduating from high school, he always coughed up the same sob story about his grandpa getting stabbed in the leg during fleet week on Broadway—back in the 1950s. "Yeah, but we’re not gonna get stabbed, Cody!" I tried to reason with him, but New York wasn’t on Cody’s horizon. For a little over a year we wrote songs together until he went off to college in Illinois to study computer science. Truth be told, most of our songs were unexceptional.

Sometimes I felt like an unripe Hammerstein without a Rogers, but that didn’t discourage me too much. What really tried my sanity was the scenery of wide-ranging farmland that encircled my backyard—a haystack-filled turf on which the bovines endlessly nibbled and shitted. Years went by; and it seemed to me that the cows packed mockeries in their mooings. No one should have to go through life feeling heckled by cows. With all of my creative potency bottled up and intensifying, I vowed to make something of myself beyond the Midwest.

After taking home an associate degree, I wrangled a scholarship to a fine arts institute in Corpus Christi, but I turned down the grant and made plans that Texas couldn’t satisfy. Call me misguided, but I’d rather be a malnourished artist in New York than a well-fed schoolboy in some Lone Star college for the barely determined. New York City equals the whole rootin’-tootin’ world squeezed into one epic town. Forward-thinking and overpopulated, it’s the headquarters of human mettle. So what if the city is perilous and rude? A tough city toughens its citizens. If anyone fails in New York—and they sure as hell do—at least they fail in the vicinity of the Chrysler Building or the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, or some other iconic symbol of greatness and modernism. As hard as New York City can be, it’s a hardship that I don’t take for granted.

***

Following the intermission of Bombay Dreams, I trot back to the cloak room to help Maya cope with a horde of snobs who’ve decided to leave the show early. The snotty lot of them is in a hurry to clear out—prodding me to hunt faster for a mislaid briefcase and then a shopping bag from Lord & Taylor. Most of these displeased guests are doddering old farts from places like Essex Fells with their half-asleep, diamond-clad wives or their wide-awake, opal-flaunting mistresses. But then we have the pseudo-New York Times critics who behave as if a shrine’s been desecrated. Naturally, they complain to the cloak room attendants with their unasked-for reviews. "This show is inexcusable," laments a prissy hipster in a homburg hat. A depthless, mawkish travesty.

"Not so much a Bombay dream as a Bombay nightmare," mutters another peeved customer. Throw a few sequins on a pile of camel shit and you call that a musical? Apologizing for their disappointment, I waste no time returning the crowd’s checked-in effects. Maya’s not half as nice. Never saying sorry for what she has no control over, she ignores all of the pretentious flak. Obviously, some musical productions are better than others, but one thing I’ll never understand is how whole balconies of people can just walk out on a Broadway show—even one that’s a downright dud.

After my shift ends, I go again into the theatre. I don’t pray very often, but when I do pray, it’s usually here. For me, this isn’t just a theatre; it’s a holy realm—a church of worldly mischief where the saints are prima donnas; and the sacrament is a sneaked-in muffin from Caffe Reggio. This theatre is my spillway to heaven; and I’ve communed with God here through plenty of tribulations: Dear Lord, let there be a way for me to pay my rent this month. Once, I found a hundred-dollar bill on the carpeted steps leading up to the balcony seats. Night after night, I could curl up and make a permanent home on these chairs—high above the stage with views of the pit and the cleaning crew as they push their vacuum cleaners through orchestra seating. Looking over its gaping luxury, I inhale the theatre’s grand odors of wood polish, musty velvet, salty coins and a lingering trace of some old lady’s Shalimar. So many nights I’ve sat here, grateful for my one job in show business. But isn’t that a laugh? If I’m in show business, every mouse in the Louvre is a great painter.

Before heading back to my apartment, I return to the locker at my gym. This time I exchange my brogues for my Converse sneakers, which I’ll wear again tomorrow while steering dogs and apportioning soup. Sometimes, before getting back on the subway, I walk through Hell’s Kitchen—just to collect my thoughts. The amount of work that I cram into a single weekday is a lot to juggle, but after living in New York for five years I’ve got a handle on my daily grind. What I don’t have a handle on is my future; and it’s starting to get worrisome. What’ll become of this eternal optimist if I can’t get a leg up on my showbiz aspirations? It’s the question that keeps me awake at night. All this time in the City of Dreams and I’m just a tired nobody with four provisional jobs and a soul-crushing case of hard luck.

Chapter 2

My apartment is number 6A, a top-floor studio in a gentrified walk-up on Bleecker Street with a window facing LaGuardia Place and a fire-escape made of flakes of green paint on scabrous, black iron. A plaque on the outside of the building says that sufferers of diverse ailings were quarantined here between 1912 and 1925. My landlord is a semi-retired bloodsucker named Mr. Jablonsky who lives in Sarasota. The rent for this teensy square is $1,185 per month and it’ll go up soon, but that’s NYC for you. The cost of living gets pricier here by the minute. And what can be done about it? Every time I pay my rent, I tell myself the money is a bribe for a kraken that lives below the city. The rent gets paid and the kraken agrees not to devour Manhattan like a cement-flavored biscuit.

As for décor, I run a sparse ship insomuch that I don’t own a single bookcase or a rug—not even a houseplant or a shower curtain. Truly, I live on the bare essentials. Last year I had a roommate named Sven who slept on a sponge-foam yoga mat next to the heater. He was a likeable guy from Croatia, but he got deported for violating the terms of his visa. Without saying goodbye, all that Sven left behind was a tube of Kalodont-brand toothpaste from his homeland and a dead shark fetus in a jar of formaldehyde. For lack of cool apartment art, I keep the pickled fish on a nightstand by my bed. Whether it’s a great white or a mako or a bull shark, I have no idea. The biological specimen is roughly eight inches long, its nose pointed upwards. One of the shark’s eyes is enlarged by a kink in the glass. Night and day, this big wobbly peeper looks straight at me—stuck on constant guard and daring me to flinch.

Today is Saturday and all my back-to-back weekday jobs feel as far away as Fiji while I laze past 9:00 a.m. in a kissable valley of bed sheets. It’s not crucial that anyone know this about me, but I prefer to sleep naked. A psychic once told me that I was a Cimmerian nudist in a previous life—around 700 BC. And maybe that explains why I get so restless in peejays. Anyway, I’d stay in bed longer, but a pesky ray of sunshine is bullying me from sloth.

My cupboards are hollow except for two family-size boxes of Wheaties. That’s my principal sustenance: Wheaties and moo juice. While having a bowlful, two of my neighbors in the hallway outside my door are shouting in a language so fiery and sensual, I reckon if they aren’t having a genuine quarrel, they could be filming a Portuguese soap opera. Now I’m dressed and showered and I’m scribbling a to-do list on last Sunday’s funnies torn out of the New York Post.

1. Laundry

2. Call mom

3. Swim

4. Visit Ning

5. d’Abruzzo’s

6. Pub Knock

Sitting in a neighborhood laundromat, I watch frazzled grandmothers ignore their toddling grandbabies while those same grandbabies proceed to lick things off the linoleum and play tug-o-war with someone’s knickers. It’s always a gritty scene here, a view of Bohemia mixed with immigrant fatigue. Today there’s a whiff-happy junkie getting high on fabric softener across from a living portrait of cranky Jamaican housewives. The women fold their stretched-out bras in the harsh fumes of Clorox. It’s cramped and depressing—this tragic washateria on Wooster Street; and yet somehow there’s romance. In this case, a clichéd bit of sexual chemistry brews between a horny college kid and a bipolar slag with her scarlet panties twirling in a drier. Apparently, if your earmuffs turn up in my wash, we’re obliged to fall in love. But I do my laundry unobtrusively and I’m careful not to get suckered into sharing my detergent. All I care about is that I leave this place with my briefs emitting a daisy-fresh courtesy.

While my clothes are still spinning, I rake my feet over to a diner and phone my mom while having a poached egg on a sourdough bagel. It’s no scant earful, today’s motherly update. Her countrified yammering tips over a long flood hearsay and dotty musings. Reportedly, a crew of asphalt mixers finally filled in the wheelbarrow-size potholes on Pawnee Road. Norma Tidmarsh, a recent divorcée and Neosho’s best manicurist, hasn’t left her trailer since Wednesday. So, now she’s the town agoraphobe. Apart from that, someone cut the tire swing off the bur oak tree in Hawfinch Park and made off with it like they’re fixin’ to build a truck from scratch. In other news, my little sister Beatrice and her husband Dale settled into an affordable townhouse in Joplin. And of course, this wouldn’t be my mother talking if she didn’t mention the cost of yarn. It’s gone up five cents per seven ounces at the needlecraft store—Scissors & Such—where she’s been working as a cashier and stock assistant ever since my dad got laid off from the Bly Mill Lumberyard when I was twelve. Now I’m twenty-eight, so that’s a long time to be peddling thimbles and crochet hooks.

The phone back home hangs on a wall over a row of ceramic canisters mottled in dingy, white paint. I can see them and every buttered dimple in the poppy rolls coming out of the oven, and the way a sunbeam lights up a cobweb lashed between a potted petunia and an old metal cheese grater adorned with a bow. My mother puts bows on everything; it’s a little preposterous. What’s more, she has two telephone personalities—a chatty, company-loving one and a nervous, distracted one that signals the nearness of my father, who usually has a giant log up his patoot. I know when she’s listening to my story about a sewer rat that I saw bop into a tattoo parlor on St. Mark’s Place and I know when that listening dwindles. Is dad there? I hear the low-pitched scrape of his chair on the linoleum. Get his breakfast on the table and we’ll talk again soon.

My father and I aren’t close. He slugged me in the head once—just for picking my nose at a Denny’s when I was six. I still begrudge him for that.

With my clean laundry all folded and sacked, I amble back to my apartment and put my clothes in a drawer, but not all of my clothes. My dress shirts and pleated slacks are traveling with me to the gym—to be stowed in my locker. Back out on the street, I waste no time running my errands.

It’s cheaper to take the subway, but I’ve been frugal all week. Quickly weighing my budget, I decide to spring for a taxicab and end up with a polite driver named Wahid Qasim from Lebanon. As we careen north through Chelsea, I watch a nail salon, an adult bookstore, a cinema, two side-by-side thrift shops and a pizzeria merge into one breakneck blur. Power on through, Wahid! I love a zippy driver. My window is down; and the streets of Midtown appear bright and crime-free with a golden twinkle spitting off of every reflective surface in sight. It’s one of those end-of-summer Saturdays with cosmopolitan New Yorkers unwinding on endless café terraces. Wahid is a crackerjack motorist and his cab doesn’t smell bad, so I tell him to keep the change as I hop out on 56th Street.

My gym occupies the top three stories of an old Greek Revival building fronted by massive columns and a classic entablature. It’s called the Meridian Health and Fitness Club of New York; and I don’t know if there’s any truth to this rumor, but someone told me that Tom Cruise lifts weights here to bulk up for his Mission Impossible movies. Aside from the locker with its keyed padlock, which I rent by the month, I joined this gym for its 25-meter swimming pool—located on the spacious roof of the place. One rapturous plunge and the water unloosens me from any given day of dogshit and disappointment.

A pleasure to see you, sir. May I bring you a vitamin soda? The welcoming staff here is bent on offering all kinds of add-on services. Sometimes it’s overkill with too many tan smilers promoting protein shakes and buff trainers on hand for assisted workouts, which always cost an arm and a leg. Also, it’s corny how this gym tries so hard to resemble a sanctum for the gods. White stone plinths abound here; and I get the impression that Zeus is nearby, having his butt waxed.

In the men’s locker room, I unload my laundered clothing and stack everything, neatly folded, into my allotted rectangle. Some old guy with a spotty breakout on his thighs wants to know if I’ve got any chaffing powder. Faking regret, I tell him that I don’t. There isn’t a square inch of privacy here, not that I’m bashful. Eager to swim, I change into my skimpy, neon green swimsuit that cost me 99¢ at a superstore run by Dominicans in Washington Heights. What I lack in style, I make up for with a strong build. Right on, bro! A stranger sums me up. You look like an orange cocktail umbrella in a lime martini.

On the gym’s expansive roof, a DJ is governing the poolside with a throbbing mash-up of songs by Enya and Eminem. High above him, an aloof lifeguard is enthroned with her nose in an issue of Self magazine. Rows of blue rope divide eight swim lanes and I wait my turn on a cot made of bleached sailcloth. The cot I’ve taken is in the shade beneath an awning set up for solar-sensitive freaks like me. I would join the sunbathers up here except I don’t sunbathe since I’m one of those blushing-bodied delicates with skin like a Celtic cherub’s. It goes back to a tribal forefather of mine who fought in the Battle of Stirling Bridge—and they say he had the pinkest ass in Scotland.

A chilled washcloth for you, sir? So accommodating are the rooftop attendants that one of them is clutching a tong and passing around ice-cold hankies. I accept one and set it over my face, inhaling a frosty mist of neroli and lavender. It’s so heavenly here by the pool, I’m beginning to crave grapes. When the DJ takes a break, the sudden absence of music allows a honking din to glide upwards from the city below—a reminder of earthbound traffic and the realities of a hectic, uneven world. Lying in a spacey daze, every cushy minute here feels like playacting. Who do I think I am? It’s a fool’s paradise, this gym membership that I can barely afford.

As soon as a swimming lane opens, I lope across the pool deck just in time to stop a little prick in a Speedo from stealing my splash. Up to my chest in chlorine, I dunk down and spring off the gypsum like a deep-sea acrobat in a sheath of starry bubbles. Thirty-two laps equal a half-mile; and I torpedo through this distance in what feels like one fantastic breath. Go figure, I’m a Pisces—forever drawn to the cleansing and baptismal properties of water. As a young boy, I once dove into a bog and came up with a 1913 buffalo nickel. Since then, I’ve always loved a hard-hitting swim. On my last lap, I think of the shark fetus by my bed and suddenly the entire pool tastes like formaldehyde.

***

Before the school shooting, Ning Lu sat at the front of my class and chomped on her fingernails while giving me confused looks and adrift stares for weeks. A blowzy Chinese girl with uncombed hair and a face sleeping two black pollywogs for eyes, she drew out all my teacherly pity. Ning, do you want to spin the adjective wheel? None of my visual aids worked on her. Every day she looked continuously more lost—somewhere between timid and terrified. Hanging back from class discussions, she spoke in shrugs and wouldn’t read aloud when it was her turn to recite a paragraph from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

After class, a few of my students informed me in their bumbling English, that Ning was a throwaway and although this word might’ve been an imprecise translation of some Chinese term, I felt sickened that it might be accurate.

Let’s not call her that, I told them. "We don’t have throwaways in this country. And if we do, we definitely shouldn’t." Seeing Ning in class the next day, I thought of all the female babies born and discarded in faraway lands—and a special report about Chinese infanticide that I saw years ago on Dateline NBC.

Throughout class, Ning looked at me with an air of suffocation—as if begging me to peel her out of some invisible egg. During our parks and gardens unit I assigned each student to research trees and to select a favorite species to share with our group. The answers ranged from banyans to yews. Your turn, Ning. What’s your tree? For a deceptive jiffy I could’ve sworn she was going to sing a whole opera in praise of willows or sycamores or some other leafy genus, but nothing came of the girl. Everything paralyzed her, not excluding the subject of trees.

It must’ve been a few weeks later when Ning Lu finally asserted herself by way of a few handwritten words. I remember the day clearly because earlier that afternoon in the soup kitchen a couple of homeless guys had brought in a large, harp-shaped ice sculpture left over from a bar mitzvah at a synagogue on 16th Street. Seeing that it was halfway melted, they asked me to hurry up and help them make slushies out of the chilled harp as if it had actually whet their appetites. Agreeing to this, I ended up nicking my thumb while chopping off chunks of ice with a steak knife. It wasn’t a very serious wound, but it bled like a Catholic saint and had me cussing like a French brickmason. Later that day, Ning handed me a note on folded stationery—written in tiny letters with a pageant of smiley faces squiggling up the margins. I didn’t read her note until I was on the subway train with my right thumb gauzed up three times its natural size.

Mr. Oliver Pyke,

I enjoy fun time of class. Thank you. I very shy! Please be friend to me?

—Ning Lu

A day later, it was rumored than Ning had taken a romantic interest in me; and for this reason, my entire class went swine bonkers. Ning in love with you, teacher! How nice you be marry soon! Evidently, this was hilarious. From the front row of the classroom to the back, all of my students aired their teeth in the unanimous tee-hee-heeing of a joke too huge to miss. Ning and the teacher! Ha! Ha! Ha! Of course, Ning was too fragile to withstand their teasing. She was mortified. Devoid of her Asian peers’ outgoing qualities, she slouched further into her lack of confidence and began eating an eraser that looked like a dirty gray toe. By this time, poor Ning was fully ostracized by her classmates. Even a very polite Korean fellow named Ji-hoon decided to stop sitting next to her.

In response to her note, I invited Ning to a bar on 2nd Avenue where a song I’d co-written was being performed by a band from the Lower East Side. Last year I answered an ad in The NYC Hailstone in response to a guitarist who was looking for a collaborator to help him lay the foundation for a political satire musical. At our first meeting I showed him a lyric I’d written, titled Dankee Yoodle about an oblivious US president who does everything backwards until the whole country is whittled into a reversal of progress. I’d intended for the lyric to uphold the style of a big Broadway show tune, but the guitarist lost interest in our project and ended up rejoining his old band—a punk rock outfit that called themselves The Stains. Following our short-lived acquaintanceship, he must’ve shown my lyric to his bandmates and—unbeknownst to me—The Stains ran with it. Last week, I got an unexpected call from the guitarist. Dankee Yoodle, he said with no explanation, had found its way onto their set list. Surprised to find out that my lyric had been appropriated by punk rockers, I was invited to come and hear the song at their upcoming gig. Ning said she’d meet me there.

I didn’t believe she’d show up—since the band wasn’t scheduled to play until 11:00 p.m. But Ning arrived early in a short black skirt and cowgirl boots, looking thirty frowns less introverted than the pitiful wretch I knew from class. Plus, she’d done a good deed to her hair that swept the anxieties out of her countenance. Thanks for coming, Ning! I said above the loudness of the scene. We sat on creaky barstools and faced the small stage above the movements of a real stinko crowd. Sorry the floor here is so sticky! I have an aversion to sticky floors and that resinous, garbagy sensation of half-dried beer and Coca Cola bonding to the shoe soles. It’s like they mop their floors with maple syrup!

Ning nodded, though I’m sure my gripe went right over her. We drank Cuba libres; and while the noise-level in the bar made meaningful conversation impossible, she leafed through a small Chinese-English dictionary and looked comfy enough.

The Stains went on an hour late and when they got to Dankee Yoodle I was too abashed by their magnificently rotten performance to lean over and tell Ning that it was my lyric. The song was a cacophonous abortion with maladroit guitar riffs that buried the vocals. Worst of all, the lead singer let loose a fatuous yodel and replaced almost all of my verses with apish howls.

After the concert let out, I walked Ning toward the direction of the subway and apologized for the nightlife if she found it distasteful. It seemed to me that every cracked slab of the sidewalk released a stinking outbreak of post-midnight filth. On Great Jones Street, a gust of hooker perfume shellacked the dark as we passed a wasted drunkard barfing in an alleyway. Those were the looming indecencies when Ning Lu braved the sweetest sentence that I’ll never forget. Thank you for this happy journey you are making for me now. Her voice was so pure and dovelike, I had to look over and see if she hadn’t shape-shifted into one of my prettier students—the ones who send me into that whirl of ecstasy with their sugared laughter and voices like bells.

Some happy journey, I said in the flickering gleam of a 24-hour dry cleaner. You’re stepping over used condoms on Upchuck Avenue with your ghastly dork for an English teacher.

At an all-night Mini Mart run by friendly Yemenis, I bought a pack of Gummi Bears and showed Ning how to bite off their heads and reattach them to different colored bodies. Try it, I said, passing her the bag as we left the store. A minute later, in the middle of 3rd Street, she made a Gummi Bear with a red body and a see-through head smothered in saliva. Yikes, Ning. That’s the most fugly-ass bear I’ve ever seen. We both laughed, falling over ourselves in the dark before reaching a subway entrance. Where do you live? I asked her.

Morny Sigh High, she said.

Morningside Heights, I enunciated correctly.

Ning lived up on 123rd Street. Seeing that my apartment was only a couple of blocks over, I had no need for the subway. But at this hour I couldn’t put a sheepish Chinese girl on the train with no defenses except cowgirl boots and a dictionary. She’d either end up square dancing with rapists or translating their death threats. (Once the hooligans come out after stupid o’clock, it’s a criminal free-for-all on the subways in New York.) So, I sat next to Ning on the train—bound for a long jolt uptown. Digging back into my bag of bears, we took turns mutating the elastic grizzlies until she got sleepy and I lent her my upper arm. Use me for a pillow, I said. Notwithstanding the noisy jiggle of the A train, she snatched a Z on my shoulder. Later, as I came home by myself, I realized that I had the beginnings of a crush on this girl.

The next day in class, Ning defeated her coyness and read out loud from The Little Prince. Not just a paragraph, she nailed a whole page. So mesmerized were my other students that even the cheekiest ones from Hong Kong applauded. My favorite tree, she threw in, "is the Yulan Magnolia."

Ning and I had our second date a week later on the first Saturday in June. This time she invited me to a cartoonish snack bar in SoHo. Through speakers in the ceiling, the small restaurant played music that sounded like the electronic beeps and pings of a video game. We drank honeydew-flavored bubble tea and swapped easy observances under a hot pink menu board. She was quiet at first, but I saw a talker under Ning’s reticence. Do you like it here in New York?

Um… Her head tipped sideways as if jammed in thought. "I not always liking New York, but I like someone in New York." A prisoner to shyness, her hand flitted upwards and blocked her mouth as if some frisky divulgence might trip off her lips.

Who do you like, Ning?

It’s so embarrassing! She refused to say.

How is it embarrassing? Just spit it out.

I can’t! Now she was taunting me.

Yes, you can. Say it or I’ll have you deported!

"I like you!" She admitted, giving the game away.

"Me? Go on! You conniving floozy."

Holding on to our cartoon beverages, we window-shopped between Lafayette and Crosby Streets—studying a selection of leaded glass lamps and also a