The Audible Commercial

A short story

I was annoyed that I had come into the office that day, because nobody else had. I was alone in the massive space. At lunch I went alone to the foodcourt across the street. It was a cloudy day in early fall. I briefly had to be outside, between the office and food court buildings, regretting that I hadn’t worn my sweater. In the foodcourt I went to a forgettable restaurant that sold bowls of various descriptions — poke, salad, açai etc. I took my ‘Mediterranean’ salad to go, carried it in a paper bag. I crossed the street, reached the square in front of my office building. There was a small film set built in the square, a crew on it shooting something. I skirted the edge of the square to avoid them. A woman wearing an expensive-looking headset came up to me.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," I said and kept walking.

"Do you want to be in a commercial?"

"Um..." I said, and she was trailing a few steps behind me.

"For Audible?" she said.

"Pardon?"

"The director saw you, he was just wondering..."

"Did you say 'Audible'?"

"Yeah! Have you...?"

"Yeah!" I said. "Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah I'd be interested..."

I altered the course of my walk to trail her back to the set; I now trailed a few steps behind her, talking to her shoulder. 

"Yeah? Ok, great," she was saying, over her shoulder. "Have you used Audible before?"

"Absolutely — I think I've had a subscription for going on ten years... I think it's the only sub I haven't canceled this decade."

"Wow!” she said, half-genuine interest. “Ok so I'm just going to get you to sit over here... "

She sat me down in a tall cloth set chair under a white plastic gazebo. 

"I'm just going to get you to sign this. Just read this and..." 

She handed me a clipboard pinching a stack of waivers. On the top waiver, there were a few points about releasing my likeness, etc. (I can't remember if I agreed to not write a short story about the commercial. They did not give me a copy of my waiver.) The PA interrupted my reading.

"I'm just going to let you know, we're going to try to get you in before lunch at... at 2:00."

I looked at my watch: 1:45.

"Sure," I despaired of being in the commercial. 

"The director really wants to get you in... but… we’ve got lunch," she said.

Unions, I thought.

There was a middle aged woman sitting next to me on another folding chair. She had been diverted from whatever afternoon activity before me, and was waiting under the gazebo for her turn. Her waiver was already signed and they brought her onto the set. She stood in front of the dozen or so staff, one of them giving her instructions, the rest either idling or making last minute adjustments to the set. The centerpiece of the set was a wooden booth with heart-shaped glass windows on all sides, a door entering into it from the side nearest our gazebo, and a carpet of rose petals strewn on the pavers leading to the door. A light drizzle was pattering on the gazebo above me. Plastic sheets always amplify the rain. I wondered if I’d even feel it yet, were I standing in the rain. A tarp knows it’s raining before people do.

Then, suddenly, they were bringing the woman back to the chair. I was in the midst of reading article seventeen of the waiver. The PA came up to me.

"Ok, we're actually going to get you on now, the director wants to get you on before lunch."

The director came up to me, a few steps behind the PA. He was a grizzled, portly man… you know, Weinsteinian. 

"What's your name?" he asked.

"I'm Eric!"

"Nice to meet you," he didn't introduce himself. "Is he ready?" he asked the PA.

"I'm just finishing..." I told him, pointing at the clipboard with the pen.

"Doesn't matter, you can finish after," he motioned for the PA to take the clipboard. "Have you been told what you're shooting?"

"No... I just know—"

"—No problem. Corey!" he called his assistant. "Can you brief Eric?"

Meanwhile, the other actor sat back down on her set chair, looking confused. This embarrassed me because I thought they were deferring her shot for mine. That is, instead of risking that they might not have the time to shoot me before lunch, they were taking the chance that they might not have time to shoot her. How mortifying, being subbed in for her. Cameramen are callous, I thought, making their decisions in the world of appearance. They wouldn't have subbed me in if they cast based on souls. The woman sat back down in the folding set chair next to mine… from which the PA was now sort of pulling me, taking the clipboard with my unfinished waiver away. We walked up to Corey.

"Eriiihhhhc... how are you?" Corey had the silver tongue and smooth metallurgic issue of a salesman sliding off the breath. He was a young man about my height with blonde hair and a commercial artist’s roguish beard.

"Good thanks!" I feigned cheer.

"Alright so have you been briefed on the content of the audiobooks?"

"No, I've only just arrived on set..."

"Alright Eric, so you're going to be in there listening to some audiobooks, mkay?"

"'Mkay.'"

"And they're romance novels."

"Fine."

"And the subject matter is a little, you know, like could be controversial for some people?"

"I'm an atheist."

"Goooood, good, Eric, you'll do just fine then."

Corey gave me instructions on how I was to walk up to the booth, how open the door, how sit in the booth, how place the headphones on my ears, and then select any button out of the three large red buttons that would be arrayed in front of me, which would play an excerpt from a 'romance' story; I would select one, play it through, meanwhile providing live commentary on what I was hearing, and when that finished, select a second excerpt to listen to as well. There would be cameras throughout the booth, microphones etc., and I was to address these machines with my commentary on the selected works. I was to say as much as possible, giving voice to my reactions to the works, which Corey was leading me to believe were, how would he have said it, obscene.

Meanwhile, since nobody was in the office with me, since it was Friday, I had smoked a joint before getting lunch. It was therefore a bit challenging to follow Corey’s instructions. Where exactly to stand, how to enter, these felt somewhat vague, like the sheet music for a jazz solo, only the shapes of the chords to indicate the key, but none of the notes really played by the soloist. I was very anxious to get the movements right but I didn't think it would make sense for me to ask for more clarification. This didn't seem like the kind of thing people would ask about if they weren’t stoned. 

Well it was too late anyways. The PA held a beautiful clapperboard in front of me. It looked like it had cost $500 — LED lights counting even the seconds down on the digital display. My internal model of a clapperboard had been a piece of cardboard with chalk on it so I was surprised to be greeted by a ‘piece of technology.’ The PA snapped the board. I did my best to enter the booth like a person would enter a booth. 

I sat down and put the headphones on. The promised red buttons were arrayed in front of me. They were, I knew from Corey, arranged from left to right in order of increasing lasciviousness. As one does, I chose far right, a red button labeled "Sooo hot." Corey reminded me, over a little speaker in the booth, to speak aloud my genuine reactions to the audiobook, and to look into the cameras. There were some GoPros arranged within the booth, one of them down and to my right, staring up into my scruffy neck, and there was a cameraman looking in through the heartshaped window of clear plastic on the front of the booth. All these would capture the authentic ticks of my facial features, my alarmed contortions at the salacious texts.

I began: "Alright... we are selecting the button labeled 'Sooo hot'... 'so' with three o's, indeed... ok... what have we got here... seems to be an intimate scene... oh... ope, yep those are... yep, we're about three seconds in and we've reached our first appearance of tentacles... ok... there seems... it seems like there are about three people — people? That there are three entities, rather... I cannot confirm that they are people... nor really that there are three of them... things all seem a little bit, um, entangled?"

As I was speaking, I had difficulty looking out of the window and at the camera. I found myself staring at the red button I had pressed, as if the button labeled 'Sooo hot' was itself the book, and if I stopped looking at it, then I would stop understanding the words. I thought, this must be performance anxiety. I remembered what this was because I had performed at a poetry reading somewhat recently. At that reading, I had meant to look at a certain person in the audience while I was performing. The person was a writer I greatly admired, and I wanted to somehow indicate to them with a glance that the poems were performed for them. To this end, I selected poems that I knew particularly well, had memorized in fact. I thought, I will read this poem, but near the end, look around the audience and find her there, and look at her as I speak the final line of the work, to show her that the work is ‘for her.’ Though I had memorized them, I nevertheless held the poems up on my phone. I did this as a safety net because I hadn't read live lately. I also did it because it has always looked stupid to me when poets memorize their own poems and don't look at their phone while reading, like we live in an oral tradition or something. I think I want to see that poets are ‘outsourcing to the page.’ Anyways, despite my plans, I was unable to take my eyes away from my phone while reading! I was physically incapable of looking at the admired writer. I was screaming at myself to move my eyes just an inch to the left and up, to where they were seated in the middle of the room; was reassuring myself that I knew the lines well enough to come unstuck from the screen. But I read two poems stuck there. Finally on the third poem, I managed to detach my gaze… only for it to be reattached, a quarter inch later, to the microphone! I stared like an idiot at the mesh ball by my lips for the final poem. 

The reason for all  this was stage fright, and here I was in the tentacle porn booth experiencing it again. This time, instead of my phone screen and the microphone as the catches of my anxiety, it was the red button, first, and secondly the GoPro camera down and to my right. So from outside, what the cameraman must have seen was me staring down into the corner of the booth, uttering extempore the tentacle porn criticism at my socks. Meanwhile the GoPro would have captured me at the worst possible angle from which a human can be shot: right under my unshaven chin, staring up into my unplucked nostrils. I do not think I looked out of the window and into the real camera, as I had been instructed, a single time.

But how I wish this had been the moment's worst ignominy. Rather, the worst was that I was wearing my Invisalign at the time, and this gave me a horrible lisp. Every S was a malevolent susurrus, a gas leak from a high-pressure cylinder. And as everyone knows, the only things a film crew prizes higher than clear images are clean sounds. I did not deliver, and I'd known I wouldn't. Even as I was waiting in my set chair, I rued the moment I would have to begin speaking — knew that they would be forced to write the scene off as soon as they heard my truculent S's. I even thought, sitting in that chair, that I should take my Invisalign trays out and stow them in my pocket. But this would have been doubly humiliating: the humiliation of me, the shooting star, reaching into his mouth with both hands, and withdrawing stinking plastic trays, vines of saliva festooned between his trays and fingers, squirreling the trays into his jean pockets, the saliva generating a dark spot on the surface of the pants. The second humiliation would be my missing teeth! I was missing teeth, indeed I'd never had them, as I have a cleft lip and palate, so no bone in part of my gum; a large gap between my left canine and my front teeth, a second gap behind the same canine, a colorless void in my smile. However, my orthodontist, knowing how ashamed I was of my teeth, would paint false teeth into the Invisalign trays, thereby papering over the void. (Admittedly, the color of the painted teeth was a little off, indeed, too white — my teeth were unusually cigarette-yellow for a... well, not so unusual for a writer, I guess.) Taking the trays out would have meant missing teeth. So I left them in — what choice did I have? Sound horrible or look horrible — that was the choice. If only the crew had found me next year, my orthodontic work concluded, implants in, the handsome normie the director had mistaken me for, rather than an unfilmable wretch with holes in his face. 

I pressed the second button. It was very similar to the first one, but with a cat as the lover instead of an octopus; instead of the sensual suction of tentacles, it told of a claw, cutting along the skin, but when she looked there was no mark, the claws were but a symbol for the edge of tolerable pleasure that courts agony (there is an identical scene in, lol, Neil Gaiman's American Gods: a woman with claws that burn but leave no mark). While I listened, I made similar comments to those you read above, so I won't bore you with another round of elliptical prose. When the scene finished, Corey came on the speaker and told me that I should exit the booth and come talk to him. Outside the door I met the entire film crew: a wall of cameras, headsets, and umbrellas in the nascent rain. 

"Eriiihcc, so how'd that go for you?" Corey asked from under his black umbrella.

"Yeahhh not bad! Definitely not my usual reading list but I enjoyed you know, experiencing something a little out of the ordinary."

"So what did you think about the audiobooks, Eric?"

"I thought they were um, consummate works of fiction, very um, visceral and imaginative."

"And did you expect your afternoon to go like this, Eric?"

"No certainly not — who expects to be pulled off the street onto a film set of thirty workers and asked to listen to tentacle porn? It just isn't really in one's predictive capacity. No, I was just expecting to go back to my office and eat my lunch… which I've left sitting in its paper bag by the set chair you sat me in," I said.

"Sorry to interrupt your lunch, Eric! What are you eating today?"

"Ummm it's like a vegetarian bowl," I said.

"Got iiiitt, sorry to keep you from your vegetarian bowl for so long!" Corey said.

"That's alright Corey! You know, seems like I ended up with a, um, a more uh carnivorous appetizer," I was going for a pun on 'carnal,' I guessed? — and did not think it exactly landed.

While I spoke to him, Corey constantly winced, like he was recoiling from my lisp, so offensive was it to his trained ear. The pronounced S’s hissed in his eardrums, inflicting real pain. You could tell he hated my voice and wanted me off his set. His questions came to a gradual end and he dismissed me. I finished signing the waiver before I left. They didn't bring the middle aged woman onto the set; time had run out before their mandated lunch. No doubt Corey wished he'd done an audio test with each of us to determine who the real beauty was. 

I went upstairs into the office, and sat at the lunch table with the view overlooking the river. My lettuce had wilted somewhat in the compostable bowl. I poured the dressing over and ingested my meal. Reader, DM me if you see me in this commercial — I'd be embarrassed to know that I made the cut.