Benjamin Hale - The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore

“It is appallingly obvious,” said Leon, “that of all writers who have ever dared to commit the English language to paper, Edgar Rice Burroughs remains second only to Shakespeare.” He suggested we visit Artie’s Shrimp Shanty for a nightcap. I was tired, but I acquiesced, so we went next door for shrimp and beer. The interior of the restaurant was cluttered with nautical paraphernalia — ships’ wheels, fishing nets, dried starfish, etc. — and lit with winking Christmas lights tacked up in a drooping contiguous string along the perimeter of the room where the wall molding met the ceiling, and the lights pulsed blobs of red and green and blue light, giving the room an undersea feeling. A giant rubber shark, its jaws gaping to show its fearsome rubber teeth, dangled on scarcely visible wires from the ceiling, looming monstrously above the curving rosewood counter of the bar. The bar was in a smaller room that adjoined the main room of the restaurant. The shark was reflected, as if it were swimming past a glass window in an aquarium, in a smudgy mirror behind the bar, which also illusively doubled the number of liquor and wine bottles arranged in three rows along the back of the bar, which was underlit with bluish lights. Leon was clearly a regular at this place: he waved to the two old men sitting at the other end of the bar and sank his body onto a bar stool as comfortably as the king he was dressed as would have sat upon his throne. I climbed onto the stool beside Leon’s, and soon the young woman behind the glossy rosewood counter placed before us two glasses of beer and a shrimp appetizer, their breaded tails fanned around a cup of red sauce. Leon began at once to greedily devour the shrimp.

“Audrey,” said Leon, “allow me to introduce you to Bruno, my acting pupil. Bruno, this is my lovely daughter, Audrey. Bruno has expressed a desire to learn my craft. Under my strenuous and unsparing tutelage, Bruno shall become a great and famous thespian.”

“Hey,” said Audrey flatly, giving me a half wave. “Where’d you meet my dad?”

“He was performing Shakespeare on the subway.”

“Dad,” she said to Leon, who was slurping the squishy wet meat out of a shrimp tail with his teeth. “Mom called earlier.”

“What could that wanton fustilug possibly want of me?”

“She’s pissed that you borrowed her car and returned it with no gas.”

“Pish! Has she no pity for a poor man?”

“Just saying. She said she called your place and didn’t get the answering machine so she called here.”

“It is currently impossible to contact me by telephone because I have been refusing to render my pound of flesh to the AT&T company,” said Leon, gravely shaking his head and brushing his hair back with his fingertips. “In any event I shan’t return her call. What could she possibly want? Financial reparations? To squeeze blood from a stone? The only sane response is to ignore her utterly. Should she call again, you must inform her that I have at long last died of starvation. Come now, Bruno. Eat shrimp.”

Leon delicately licked the beer froth from his mustaches, made a series of nipping noises with his tongue and lips and ordered another round, another shrimp appetizer, and three shots of whiskey. Audrey gamely knocked jiggers with us and we all drank.

Audrey was a stocky, thick-limbed girl in her twenties, though she was nowhere near as fat as her father. She had a lot of tattoos on her biceps and a round, pretty face. She spoke quickly and cuttingly in a sharp, nasal voice, and her eyes spent a lot of time sardonically rolling around in her head. She tended the bar at Artie’s and let Leon drink for free if her boss — Artie himself — was not present, though she hinted that Artie tacitly suspected this and did not much mind. It was clear that Audrey loved her father, but in the world-wise and resigned way in which children who are more mature than their parents sometimes do; that is, they may choose to love them honestly and deeply even though their love is darkened somewhat by the resentment that their parents’ irresponsibility by necessity pushed them too early into taking care of themselves; but she loved him, anyway. Leon ordered more beer, and then it was late and I was drunk, the restaurant was empty and the houselights had come on, and we had to go. The next day we began to rehearse our performances of Shakespeare.

When I met him Leon Smoler was a great and brilliant and unpromising and utter failure. He’d spent a lifetime perfecting failure almost to an art form. He had failed at many arts. He was a failed director, a failed actor, a failed writer, a failed musician, a failed photographer, a failed housepainter, a failed gravedigger, a failed commercial fisherman, a failed substitute high school teacher, a Princeton University dropout, an avowed alcoholic, a dishonorably discharged veteran, and a three-time divorcé. A Renaissance man, a jack-of-all-trades, and a master of few. He was fifty years old when I met him. He’d thus far spent his life pinging around like a pinball from one elaborate catastrophe to the next. He had once directed an off-off-Broadway production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed entirely in the nude. He lived in Los Angeles for a while, working as a set painter. Life in Hollywood fizzled out and he moved back to New York, where he founded a theatre company to produce his own plays, which he wrote in accordance with Artaud’s manifesto on the Theatre of Cruelty. This feat of entrepreneurial derring-do also ended in ignominious bankruptcy. He had played Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Shylock, Brutus, Falstaff. He had been stabbed to death many times over, as Polonius, as Claudius, as Banquo, as Julius Caesar. Somewhere in all that Leon got married and divorced three times, though none of these marriages lasted more than a few years. He has two grown children from different marriages, Audrey and Oliver (both named after Shakespearean characters), to whom he was a permissive and incompetent father. Oliver lived far away and seldom saw his father, whom he resented, but Audrey lived nearby with her girlfriend and worked behind the bar at Artie’s. On that particular day in March when I met him, he had been busking Shakespearean monologues on the subway because he had recently been sacked (for insubordination) from his job as a bus driver. Following his sacking he had liberated the Henry VIII costume from the dressing room of a theatre company to which he still had an illegally copied key, and went to work.

“It was not stealing, because it is impossible to ‘steal’ a possession unneeded by its possessor,” he said. “They could not possibly have needed it, because it would never have fit anyone but me. I played Henry VIII in a spectacularly wretched production of that deservedly underproduced play a year or two ago. The costume was designed to my specifics and would never fit another human being. Therefore, by virtue of my physiognomy, it is rightfully mine.” He invented a name for his one-man theatre company — the Shakespeare Underground — and took to the trains, riding them all day, yo-yoing up and down along the length of Manhattan and undulating back and forth across the breadth of it, walking from one train compartment to the next, shaking his coffee can and allowing his lungs to be inflated with and his soul to be possessed by the words of Falstaff, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Shylock, Prospero, reciting whatever speeches came to mind in whatever order in which they came, a revolving cast of kings, princes, sorcerers, moneylenders, and madmen, lovers and the beloved, traitors and the betrayed, murderers and the murdered, haunting the reeking and rattling underground trains with Shakespeare’s ghost.