Chapter Twenty
Chapter
Twenty
On the first day Danny cut class, he watched A Chorus Line.
School wasn’t an option when everyone hated your guts.
That was how Danny found himself at the Lincoln Center fountain with hours to kill and nowhere to go.
After the Pippin cast party, he knew he couldn’t face his friends—not after what he’d said to Christian, or what he’d done to Nina, or what the rumors probably spreading through LaGuardia like wildfire said he was—the biggest piece of shit to ever tread the boards of the Upper West Side.
Danny tugged the collar of his jacket tight around his neck as No-Eyes crooned out the final few notes of “My Funny Valentine,” one of his Aunt Ro’s favorites. He looked over to the man sitting next to him on the bench, drinking a pastry-cart coffee and thumbing through a copy of the Post.
“DEAD CAT POUNCE: ‘We Give Up’ on Finding Lion Alive, Says Giuliani,” the front page announced.
Jesus. Danny shivered, glancing down at his watch. Homeroom was barely over. Still six more hours left to kill.
“Library’s open if you get too cold out here,” a crackly voice said from across the plaza.
Danny looked up to find No-Eyes smiling in his direction.
“Up past the spider statue,” the man said, tipping his head.
Danny looked to his left at the large steel sculpture in the distance. He supposed it did sort of look like a spider.
“I’d be there right now, but my library card’s expired. Gotta have an address to check out books,” the man said, shrugging. “Not like I’ve done much reading since the accident.”
“Oh,” Danny mumbled, torn between wanting to ask a follow-up question and preferring not to know.
“I used to love watching the Theatre on Film and Tape movies,” No-Eyes said, folding his hands in his lap.
“I, uh…I’m not sure what you mean,” Danny said, cocking his head.
“Up on the third floor,” No-Eyes said, pointing in the direction of the building behind the spider statue. “Can see any Broadway show and they don’t charge you a dime.”
“Wait, really?” Danny asked, his back straightening.
The man nodded.
There was a place to see Broadway shows and you didn’t have to pay for them? How was this not the first thing they taught you at performing arts school?
“Hey, thanks,” Danny said, standing up and fishing in his jeans pocket for his lunch money. “And thanks for the songs.”
“Barnabas,” the man said as Danny dropped the dollar bill in his cup.
“Sorry?”
“My name,” the man said, smiling. “Barnabas.”
“Oh,” Danny said, mouthing the man’s name to himself, feeling a little guilty that up until now, he’d been mentally referring to him as No-Eyes. “I’m Danny.”
“Thank you, Danny.”
Even the fanciest library in the world still smelled like the one in Danny’s hometown.
It was the first thing he noticed as he pushed through the big glass doors: a mix of campfire smoke, wet logs, and a hint of the incense Father O’Malley swung during Sunday mass.
Acres of bookshelves stretched before him, lined up like dominos, with silence thick enough to feel, broken only by the occasional creak of a wooden chair.
“Up on the third floor,” Barnabas’s words echoed in Danny’s head as he stepped onto the elevator.
Sure enough, there was a button labeled “Third Floor: Theatre on Film and Tape.” Exiting the elevator, he looked around, his eyes landing on a glassed-off area with a silver banner adorning the entrance—“Lucille Lortel Room: Theatre on Film and Tape.” He approached the glass doors, but hesitated just before entering, realizing that he had absolutely no friggin’ clue what he was doing.
Could he just grab a tape off the shelf like at his local video store?
And where was he supposed to watch it? He should have asked Barnabas more follow-up questions.
Danny reached for the handle of the door when a high-pitched voice halted him in his tracks.
“Sir,” the voice called from behind him. “Can I help you?”
Danny turned to find a chubby man in a green plaid sweater vest, sitting behind a desk, wearing a dubious expression.
“Yes,” Danny said, thankful for the rescue. “I was told I could see a Broadway show on tape here.”
The man raised an eyebrow, looking Danny up and down. “Uh-huh,” he said, in a somewhat pinched voice. “And do you have an appointment?”
“Oh,” Danny murmured. “No. Do I need one?”
The sweater vest man let out a deep sigh. “Appointments can be made by calling in advance. You need to give us time to load the reels before the viewing.”
“Oh,” Danny said, somewhat disappointed, before remembering just exactly how much spare time he had to kill. “Well, I have nowhere to be. Can I make one now and you can just let me know when you’re ready?”
Sweater Vest sighed another heavy sigh and looked around the room as if expecting other patrons to join him in his chorus of eye rolling. “I suppose I could. What is it that you need to see?”
“What do you have?” Danny replied quickly, taking a step closer to the desk.
“Sir,” Sweater Vest groaned, clearly losing his patience. “This is the Lincoln Center Library. We have literally everything. Well, everything since 1970,” he corrected himself, picking a piece of lint off his sleeve.
“So I can just pick a show and you let me watch it?”
“Preeeetty much,” the man said, thrumming his fingers on the desk.
“Great. I’d like to see Rent!”
“Ba-HA!” The man let out a laugh that was entirely too loud for a library before quickly shooting his hands up to his mouth to suppress the outburst. He slowly peeled his fingers away. “You’re joking, right?”
“Is that a no?”
“Yeah, it’s a no, hon,” the man said, chuckling to himself. “You can’t just see Rent here. Do you know how many strung-out teens from Jersey would be lining up outside if we just let people see Rent? No. A show has to be closed before it’s allowed to be screened at the Archives.”
“Oh,” Danny muttered. “Then I guess…How about A Chorus Line?” he replied, thinking of the first show that popped into his head.
The only thing he knew about it was that it was the longest-running show in Broadway history, which he hoped made it a safe choice.
Plus, at some point his uncle’s cast recording had been taped over by a Mets game.
“Of course we’ve got that,” the man puffed. “I’ll need your reason for wanting to screen it.”
“My reason?” Danny raised his eyebrow in annoyance. So many questions—it’s not like I’m trying to rent Debbie Does Dallas here.
“Look, kid,” Sweater Vest grunted, exasperated. “We can only screen these titles if you have a legitimate research reason—writing a paper on the show, auditioning for a role, something like that. We can’t just show them willy-nilly. So you’ll need to give me a valid reason.”
Danny looked down at his shoes. This was a stupid idea.
He hadn’t thought it through. Add this to the giant list of things Danny Victorio didn’t know.
But when he looked back up, the man’s expression seemed to have softened a bit.
Perhaps it was because it was early in the day, or perhaps Sweater Vest was just tired of having to negotiate with a newbie, or perhaps it was because it wasn’t so long ago that Sweater Vest himself was a confused teenager, just praying for a crumb of anything even remotely theatre-related.
“You’re writing a paper, correct?” Sweater Vest said, prompting him.
“A paper,” Danny echoed, straightening up. “That’s right. I…am writing a paper on, um, A Chorus Line.”
Without missing a beat, Sweater Vest pulled out a form from the stack on his desk and began filling it out without even looking up.
“And let me guess,” he said, scribbling notes. “You go to Juilliard, right?”
“Er,” Danny balked.
“You go to Juilliard,” the man repeated, more telling than asking.
“Because you definitely aren’t just a high schooler who’s cutting class and using this place as a truant’s hangout.
You’re definitely writing a paper about devised theater and its impact on commercial Broadway for one of your classes at Juilliard.
” The man looked up with a challenging stare. “Isn’t that right?”
“Yep,” Danny said. “That’s right.”
Danny was led through the glass doors into a dimly lit room where chunky swivel chairs sat beneath battered desks, each one creaking under the weight of a clunky old TV set and a pair of oversized, old-fashioned headphones—the kind he used to plug into his uncle’s tape deck.
The archive film of A Chorus Line was not what Danny had expected.
As the video monitor sputtered to life, it looked like one of those World War II newsreels he’d seen in movies.
For a full minute, the screen flickered with a gray box, like it was being played from a busted old film projector.
Then slowly, shapes began to appear—rows of bodies moving in sync, kicking and flicking while a piano banged out a percussive tune and a man’s voice barked haughty commands.
“Step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch. Again! Step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch. Again!”
At first, Danny wondered if they’d loaded the wrong film.
This didn’t seem to be a musical at all—it looked like an old-time rehearsal or a dance class.
The man shouting out steps sounded a lot like Madame Chernyshevsky, and the dancers weren’t wearing costumes, but clothes similar to what his classmates wore in ballet class. And then they began to sing.
“God, I hope I get it. I hope I get it.”