Saint Vidicon to the Rescue

Chapter 12

“You need distraction,” Father Vidicon advised, “and I have a plea that needs answering.”

“Oh, yeah?” Tony asked, immediately interested, then was amazed at his eagerness. Maybe he did need a break from worrying over his future with Sandy. “Who’s in trouble how?”

“A company of actors,” Father Vidicon said. “They’re on the road, touring a comedy through the Midwest, and things are going wrong—inexplicably, I might add.”

“Of course,” Tony said. “If they were explainable, they’d fix them instead of calling on you.”

“You are learning this business,” St. Vidicon said, with an amused smile. “Go unsnarl them, Tony, would you?”

Sometimes you get a bad feeling about a show. I mean, you aren’t even on the road when you realize things are going to go wrong—little things, nothing huge or life-threatening, but so many of them that it’s going to take the gloss off every performance and make everybody miserable. The electrician will miss a cue or two, nothing that the audience will notice but enough to give the actors a bad feeling; an actor will get confused and repeat a sequence of lines; a stagehand will leave the stairs six inches out of true, and they’ll trip the unwary actor and leave a gap between two “flats,” two fake walls, that the audience won’t see but will bother another actor on a level so low that he won’t even realize it—or a spotlight will come crashing down in the middle of a performance.

Now, that requires two mistakes—neither terribly hard to make, especially considering that, when you’re touring, the crew have to hang lights all over again every time we come to a new town, which is every week and sometimes twice. The good side of such a routine is that they get to know the light plot so well that they could hang the lights in their sleep. The bad part is that is that they sometimes come perilously close to doing exactly that. After all, they have to take down the lights after one performance and drive hundreds of miles overnight to a new city where they have to hang the lights all over again, which doesn’t give them much time in bed—they nap in the truck and are sometimes pretty groggy when they start climbing ladders again.

Still, for a spotlight to fall means that the electrician not only forgot to tighten the clamp that holds it to the pipe over the stage, but also forgot to fasten the safety chain—a piece of steel cable that loops around the pipe and the yoke, the spotlight’s “handle.” Mind you, I’m not saying it can’t happen, as the gouge in the floor of the theater in Indianapolis will attest. Fortunately, the spotlight fell two feet away from Lon as he was sternly lecturing the young roommates. Unfortunately, it threw him off for the rest of the performance. Worse, he couldn’t even chew out the lighting crew because they were union—IATSE—and he was Actors’ Equity. He couldn’t complain to the director, either, because she was back in New York.

He could, however, complain to the stage manager, which he did, loudly and at great length, with the whole cast joining in, and when I’d finally managed to calm them down, I had to go talk to the union shop steward. Of course, my union is Actors’ Equity, as is theirs, but I’m one of the rare ones who has his IATSE card, too. Even without it, union rules allowed me to “communicate” with the IATSE shop steward about making sure his people got enough sleep.

“Enough sleep?” Joe gave me a hoarse laugh. “We’d just driven eight hours, put up the set and hung the lights, then managed a two-hour nap while you guys were rehearsing, and I’m supposed to make sure they get enough sleep?”

I felt as though I could walk under a canary with plenty of headroom. “Yeah, I know, Joe,” I said, “but we’re gonna be here for two days. Maybe your folks could catch up on the Zs?”

“Which we intend to do,” Joe said, “if some smartalecky stage manager doesn’t keep us up all night with asinine gripes.”

He said it without rancor; he knew I had to complain to him because the actors had complained to me, and he knew I knew why his crew hadn’t been as careful as they might have been if they’d been fully conscious.

“Sometimes the stage manager has to pay lip service to trying to keep the show in shape.”

“Yeah, I know, kid.” Joe gave me a commiserating slap on the shoulder. “It ain’t the world’s easiest job for any of us. At least you’re a grown-up.”

I appreciated that. At thirty-two, it was nice to think I had finally come into adulthood. On the other hand, I no longer felt young. To Joe I was still a kid, of course—he was in his fifties. “Sometimes I do kinda feel like the chaperone on the high school Washington trip,” I admitted.

“Don’t we both!” Joe rolled his eyes. “Only way I can still make it through setups is because I let them drive.”

I knew he had rigged a sort of bed in the scene truck—a slab of foam in the “loft” over the cab. “We better not let them unwind too long,” I said. “Right now, they need sleep more than beer.”

Joe bristled. “You talking about your kids or mine?”

“Yes,” I agreed. “ ’Scuse me—I gotta get down to the bar and see which actress Al and Will are going to fight over tonight.”

“Good luck, kid.” Joe grinned. “I’d rather be chief electrician than stage manager any day.”

Stage manager? I don’t manage the stage, I manage the people!

I made sure everything was ship-shape backstage—picked up a few props and put them back on the table, made notes to warn Lon and Arlene that once more leaving their pipe and gun, respectively, in their dressing rooms instead of on the prop table would result in a fine, then checked to make sure the ghost light was on—really the job of the local IATSE crew, but it could be one of my actors who became the ghost if it hadn’t been left on and he or she tried to cross the stage in the dark. People have fallen through trapdoors carelessly left open, walked off the edge of the stage into the orchestra pit, and tripped over props and hit their heads on stage pegs, so I made sure the single work light was lit to let the ghosts of old actors know they were welcome to come back—and headed off toward the nearest tavern to join the kindergarten set.

On this tour, by some fluke, everyone was under thirty, even the actress playing the mother—Arlene may have been twenty-five, but she had the right facial shape and the right build so that she could play older. When she wasn’t made up to look fifty, of course, her figure seemed voluptuous, not matronly, and her face looked slumberous and seductive, but onstage I could have sworn she was ready to sit in with my grand-mother’s bridge club. Only part of it was makeup, of course—the gal could really act. Character actors generally can. Ingenues, juveniles, and leads can at least look the part.

Even at that, Arlene was the senior citizen of our onstage set. The rest of them were just out of college and still working on their Equity points. I came in the door to find my charges had commandeered a table, but that Arlene, Britney, and Debbie had already attracted a small group of standees, all for some reason male, who were giving my boys challenging looks. Farther down the table, the stagehands were giving those looks right back.

Some companies, the actors won’t even sit with the techs and don’t realize the stagehands are snickering at them behind their beers. At least I had them both at the same table, even though it was IATSE at one end and Equity at the other. Sometimes I could even pull them all into the same conversation.

Tonight, however, looked to be brewing up a different kind of solidarity. One of the locals leaned down for a closer look at Ashley’s neckline, and Jory asked, “Need glasses?”

“Shut up, kid,” the local said, not even looking at him.

“He talks,” Jory said in tones of exaggerated wonder. “Gary, did you hear that? It talked!”

The local looked up with a frown. “You want your teeth fixed?”

“At least I still have them,” Jory answered.

The local rumbled anger and came for him.

Jory stood up, grinning.

I caught the local’s arm as he passed, shoved it up behind his back, grabbed his shoulder with my left, and said, “We take it outside.”

His friends shouted and started for me, but two of the stagehands stood up behind Jory. Mike and Al were each well over six feet and bulky with muscle. The locals hesitated.

“Thanks, guys.” Jory swerved past them and came after me.

For some reason, the other locals between me and the door didn’t try to interfere—they let us pass, then followed us. That blocked Jory from catching up, unfortunately. Well, maybe not so unfortunately.

I frog-marched the loudly-protesting local into the parking lot and spun him as I let him go so that he ended up against a wall. Snarling, he stepped away, bringing up his fists, and the crowd muttered appreciatively, forming a semicircle.

I kept my fists on my hips. “You don’t want to fight with my boys,” I told him. “They’re all black belts except Jory, and he used to spar with a kid who made Golden Gloves.”

That gave the local pause, but he had to save face. “All you actors are gay,” he snarled. “Everybody knows that.”

Well, not all—but a substantial percentage of my fellow showmen are indeed homosexual. Theater is one of the few professions where they won’t be hassled for it, where a man’s talent and skill count for more than his sexual orientation. “Not every actor,” I told him, “and even gays have to learn how to fight these days.”

“Yeah, sure,” he sneered.

“Aw, hell, Jack,” said one of the stagehands’ voices, “I thought we were going to have some fun.”

“Just an exercise in practical education, Lyle,” I told him without looking away from the bellicose local, “and I don’t think he’s going to need a tutor.”

“Yeah, and what do you think you could teach him?” Another local stepped forward toe-to-toe with Lyle.

My local stared past me, gawking. I swung around beside him with a wary glance out of the corner of my eye, but he was all rapt attention, watching the big man who was no doubt the local champion challenging the invader. That quickly, he had shifted from boxer to spectator.

The champ was every inch as tall as Lyle with, I could have sworn, the same black hair and beard. They were both muscular and had the kind of thickened belly that looks like fat but is all muscle.

“I could teach him street fighting,” Lyle said with a lazy grin. “Maybe you, too.”

“Might be you’d learn a little more than you wanted.” The local leaned in nose to nose.

“Phew!” Lyle stepped back, waving his hand across his face. “Your buddies really oughta tell you about that breath.”

The local grinned wider. “You got a problem with my breath?”

“No,” Lyle said, “you do. Really oughta try cleaning the chitlins before you eat them.”

An ominous silence fell, and my heart rose to block my throat. Indy is close enough to the Mason-Dixon line that you don’t tell a Good Ol’ Boy he eats chitlins.

With a snarl, the local charged—but Lyle pivoted out of the way, and it was dark enough that nobody could have said for sure that he kicked as he turned, but the local did trip and fall. He scrambled to his feet just as the siren wailed, and the parking lot lit up with flickering blue-and-red lights.

The spectators disappeared like butterflies in autumn, but Lyle and the local still stood toe-to-toe, neither willing to give in before the other. Neither of them seemed to be daunted by the thought of a night in jail. I, however, had the reputation of the company to consider, not to mention trying to shift the scenery tomorrow night without Lyle’s help. I stepped up to the two Goliaths and hissed, “Indian wrestle!”

They both turned to me with blank stares, but the doors of the patrol car slammed, and they spun toward each other, locking hands and setting shoe against shoe. They strained against each other’s pull in perfect, rigid stillness as the patrolman stepped up. “What’s going on here?”

“Just a friendly test of strength, Officer.” I stood hands on hips, watching.

The policeman took the sight in with one sweep of his flashlight and grunted. “What’re you doing here?”

“Somebody has to referee,” I said, “or they’ll start arguing about whose back foot moved first.”

The local champion yanked hard, but Lyle was ready for him and yanked too. The local lunged forward, trying to throw Lyle off-balance, but he’d played this game often enough to know that the yank would probably be followed by the lunge and shoved hard.

Stasis.

The cop was still, watching.

Lyle yanked to the side, then shifted and pulled back. The local wavered.

The cop laughed. “Almost had you there, Bull.”

“Almost,” Bull grunted, and executed a sudden pull-twist-shove maneuver. Lyle whirled his free arm, striving for balance and managing to keep it, but his back foot shifted an inch.

“Score!” the cop declared. “Moved your back foot, stranger.”

“Only an inch.” Lyle relaxed. “Only one fumbling . . .”

The local yanked—but Lyle, readier than he looked, yanked back too, with a laugh. “Round two?”

“Game’s over,” the cop said firmly. “Settle for winning, Bull.”

“Awright, then.” Bull straightened with a grin. “You owe me a beer, stranger.”

“The best the house has got.” Lyle slapped him on the shoulder and turned away. Back inside the bar they went, trading friendly insults having to do with their ancestry. As I remember, Bull was denying any relationship to the orangutan Lyle was hypothesizing as his grandfather and countering by claiming descent from a buffalo.

“Nice maneuvering,” the cop said.

“Looks like Bull has played this game before,” I answered.

“So have you,” the cop said. “I had a call about a barroom brawl that had moved outdoors.”

“Must have been some other tavern,” I said.

“Yeah, it must,” the cop agreed. “Make sure it stays that way, okay?”

I did my best.

Nobody minded if Lyle seemed a little hungover the next day. Everybody was looking well rested when they showed up for makeup call. The stagehands ran through the preshow light check, sound check, and scene check while Maryann made sure everything was where it should be on the prop table, then reluctantly admitted to me that no one had to pay a fine that night. I went back to the makeup room, telling myself that one of these days I was going to let Lon and Arlene know how much they owed me for picking up after them. As usual, I decided that day would come when we were all safely back in New York and the tour had closed.

As I came in, Lon stood up, glaring down at Johnny, and demanding, “Who says I did?”

“It’s your kind of sense of humor.” Johnny glared. “And you haven’t exactly shown respect for other people’s makeup before.”

“You think I want to get pink-eye from your infected eye shadow?”

I sidled a little closer to see what the problem was. Johnny’s makeup kit was open, and a lump of nose putty lay in the bottom. My eyebrows shot up when I saw how it had been shaped.