Chapter Two
Chapter
Two
He exploded out onto Sixty-Sixth Street like a cork from a bottle of Martinelli’s on New Year’s, finally able to breathe again.
Danny’s heels compassed in circles as he searched for signs pointing to LaGuardia High School, or Lincoln Center, or something useful.
An old woman pushing a squeaky upright shopping cart crossed his path, her back so hunched over, she could probably smell the mud caked to the soles of his Keds.
“ ’Scuse me, ma’am. Could you tell me where LaGuardia High is?”
“Go fuck a swine’s ass,” she grunted without looking up, never interrupting her step-touch-squeak.
Danny, unsure how to respond, gave a curt nod and a reflexive “Yes, ma’am,” which he immediately regretted when the woman spun and glared at him like he’d told her to…well, never mind.
Danny, shoulders tense and face probably already flushed with humiliation, turned toward a building with mile-high arches like something printed on the back of money, fronted by a gushing fountain that looked like the world’s swankiest baptismal pool.
That must be it. He bounded up the stairs toward the arched building, the words to his monologue repeating in his head like a Hail Mary, but before he could enter what he assumed was the entrance to the building and, therefore, the rest of his life, a woman in a black security guard uniform stepped in front of him.
“Oh, um…’scuse me, ma’am,” Danny said nervously, silently preparing to be told to have sex with another farm animal. “Do you know where the auditions are?”
“The what?” the guard asked, her eyebrows knotting.
“The auditions,” he repeated, a little louder.
“Hon, you’re gonna need to be more specific. This is Lincoln Center.”
“Oh,” he muttered. “For LaGuardia?” he asked, rolling back his shoulders. “The performing arts high school?”
She smiled, apparently with recognition, but also maybe a little condescension. “You’re in the wrong place. That’s down on Amsterdam,” she pointed behind her. “Over on Sixty-Fifth.”
“Thanks, ma’am!” he shouted, charging off.
“Good luck!” he imagined her calling after him.
Danny bolted down the stairs and rounded the corner on Sixty-Fifth Street, but screeched to a halt when a familiar tune hit his ears—a clear tenor voice cutting through the car horns and dump trucks and jackhammers.
Lida Rose, I’m home again,
Rose to get the sun back in the sky.
Danny immediately recognized the song—it was from one of his tapes.
Of all the sounds he’d expected to hear on his journey to the Upper West Side, the barbershop quartet from The Music Man had to be dead last. He followed the tune, which led him to a man sitting on a milk crate and singing to no one.
He wore an old gas station jacket and a pair of dirty Reeboks with his big toe poking out the front like a pig in a blanket.
Danny approached the man, who was holding a handmade sign that read in big block letters, “I HAVE NO EYES.” A chill ran up Danny’s spine as he traced a path to the man’s face, where, sure enough, above his cheerful, singing lips, were a set of clenched, empty eyelids.
Danny reached into his pocket and felt the dollar bill his mom had left on the kitchen table that morning for hot lunch.
Maybe it was a good omen? A Broadway tune this close to his audition?
It couldn’t have been a mistake. Plus, like the sign said, he had no eyes.
He placed the rolled-up dollar bill in the man’s coffee-stained paper cup, the phrase “We Are Happy to Serve You” printed, Greek-esque, in blue and yellow ink.
“Thank you, young man,” the blind man said, nodding almost graciously and pausing only briefly before returning to his crooning ballad.
Danny jogged away, too focused on not getting lost to wonder how the guy with the sign knew he was young, or a man.
Danny peered up at the concrete tower. “Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts,” the building announced itself in iron letters two feet high.
It looked different from the picture he’d sketched in his mind.
He suddenly felt like such a dumbass for imagining some kind of moated castle, chilling between skyscrapers, with pruned hedges and students wearing scratchy wool sweaters, wandering the grounds with tap shoes slung over their shoulders.
Pushing through the glass doors of LaGuardia High was like stepping out of the Jeep at Jurassic Park.
Everywhere he turned was a new species of teen—pink tights stretching into impossible splits, fingers thrumming patterns on imaginary keyboards, portfolios stuffed with sketches, lips buzzing scales, toe shoes and hair gel and thermoses and moms. Moms everywhere.
Moms filling out forms, moms braiding pigtails, moms giving pep talks, moms tuning cellos, moms wiping toothpaste from the corners of mouths with spit-dampened thumbs.
He thought about his own mom, sitting in front of the TV, one hand switching the channel to The Price Is Right, the other dangling a Lucky Strike with a precariously long tail of ash.
A black-tar feeling grew in Danny’s chest. For the first time since that day in February when he’d opened the mailbox at his uncle’s place in Port Richmond and found a brochure for a school in New York mysteriously addressed to “RESIDENT,” that day when Danny had convinced himself that it must be one of his uncle’s tricks, but maybe also a sign, that day when he saw his future stretching out before him like the yellow printed text at the beginning of a Star Wars movie.
It was the first time since that day that Danny had ever considered the fact he might not even get accepted.
His planning had been so precise and his journey so impossible that he’d honestly never dreamed past this moment.
He’d assumed that his mere arrival would cue the trombones and confetti cannons and a troupe of spectacled old teachers would march toward him with outstretched arms. “My word, good boy! You’ve done it!
You’ve made it all the way to Sixty-Fifth Street!
No one from the North Shore has ever made it this far! ”
Danny looked around at the other kids dressed in their slick leotards, crisp button-downs, and sundresses, all with neatly combed hair like they were headed to a goddamn Christmas pageant.
He looked down at his own outfit: grass-stained khakis, scuffed sneakers, and a baggy blue polo embroidered with the mustard crest of his dumbass Catholic school, the words “STATEN ISLAND” embroidered under it to complete the picture of someone who belonged anywhere but here.
He ran his fingers through his wiry black hair, trying, unsuccessfully, to create something resembling a part, and tucked in his shirt, considering for a second if he should turn it inside out.
Why hadn’t he thought to bring a change of clothes?
“Daniel Victorio,” a woman with a clipboard called out, her voice echoing through the cavernous lobby.
“Present!” he blurted out reflexively, his throat so tight that it came out about an octave higher than usual. He immediately regretted how eager he sounded. So gay.
“Follow me,” the woman called out, having already turned around and walked back through the double doors from which she’d emerged.
Danny’s heart started th-thudding, his breath hu-huffing.
His Keds, moving in direct contradiction with his brain, followed the clipboard lady down the hallway.
They marched down to the basement level, the staircase twice as wide as anything at St. Pete’s.
They walked past a row of rooms, the acrid smell of Windex and woolly old clothes hanging in the air.
“You’ll do your monologue first, followed by your song,” the clipboard lady said. “Announce your name when you walk in.”
They arrived at an open door marked by a sign that read “Black Box.” Inside, the walls, the ceilings, every surface imaginable was painted in thick charcoal brushstrokes, a row of inky velvet curtains draped along the back wall.
The perimeter of the room was lined with stacked folding chairs, black painted wooden cubes, and a single table in the center where four grown-ups sat shuffling papers.
“Stand on X!” a wheezy woman’s voice commanded in a vampire-y accent.
Danny looked around, confused, until he spied the masking tape X slapped onto the floor in the center of the room.
Danny looked over to the adults (teachers?
professors? directors?) before him, two men and two women, each waiting expectantly.
Their ages ranged: Some looked like they could be in college, others like they could be hosting bingo in his church basement.
They were dressed from schlubby to elegant and everywhere in between.
“And you are?” the vampire-y voice called out, belonging to a harsh-looking woman swaddled in a draped sweater that made it look like she was huddled in a pile of sled dogs.
Her eyes were sunken and her cheekbones pointy as elbows and she had maybe ten strands of hair total, all pulled tight into a bun the size of a doughnut hole.
“Hi,” he said meekly, with a small wave. “I’m Danny Victorio.”
He paused.
“Well, Daniel Victorio,” he added, thinking maybe it sounded more, like, professional or something.
“ ‘Danny Victorio’ has a ring to it,” the old white guy at the end of the table said, his voice crackling like yellowed newspaper. Well, good instincts so far, Danny thought as he eyed the homemade flannel patch haphazardly sewn to the elbow of the teacher’s corduroy blazer.
“It says here you’re a would-be transfer student?” the vampire-y woman said, hunching over what Danny assumed was the application he’d posted months ago from a graffitied mailbox on the North Shore. “Is that correct?”
“Yeah.” Danny nodded. “I’m a sophomore at St. Peter’s.”
They stared.
“Catholic?”
They continued staring.
“On Staten Island?”
That raised a few eyebrows.