Читать книгу The Voiceover Artist - Dave Reidy - Страница 6

PROLOGUE

Simon Davies

BEHIND A DOOR I’d closed against a father who wasn’t home yet and the wintry draft seeping through the living room window, I sat on my bed—my childhood bed, though I was twenty-four years old by then—listening to a clock radio, waiting to hear the right word. What I heard first was the voice of Larry Sellers, a man I considered a better friend to me than my brother ever would be.

From the age of thirteen, I’d devoured Larry’s masterful renditions of the bargains to be found in my grocer’s freezer—a twenty-count box of Van de Kamp’s fish sticks on sale for three ninety-nine, or Dole Fruit and Juice bars for eighty-nine cents a piece—but his run as the voice of Jewel Foods had ended two years ago, and I hadn’t heard much of Larry on the radio since then. As he called my attention to the Winter 2007 Sales Event at Peoria’s Prairie State Chevrolet, I heard the excess weight in his jowls and detected some shortness of breath, but Larry’s voice was still a flawless instrument. I closed my eyes, immersing myself in the warmth of Larry’s sonorous performance and floating over the waves of its subtly rhythmic rising and falling.

And then Larry Sellers said the right word: “Financing.”

I wasn’t in the market for a car loan, so the tingling that climbed the back of my neck had nothing to do with zero-percent rates. The rightness of “financing” lay in its linguistics. “F” was a fricative. A fricative would do the trick.

I slid a greasy fingernail into a ridge on the volume dial and spun it toward me until it clicked. Radio off. I sat in the silence I’d made, a silence that was mine to break.

I pulled in my lower lip. The chapped skin adhered to the ridge of my upper teeth. I drew a breath through my nostrils. Then I forced air against the lip and the teeth, and at the mere thought of voicing the word’s first vowel, my esophagus clenched in a wrenching seizure. What air I could snatch was quickly released in frantic nasal snorts. I could have strummed the tendons in my neck like the strings of a lyre. It went on, this strangulation from the inside, for more than two minutes.

When it was over, I triggered it again.

So commenced the process—who could have known how long it would take?—of using the convulsive power of my stutter to jolt my vocal folds from the atrophy that set in seven months after I went silent as a seven-year-old boy. Once the heavy chain that choked and tethered me, my stutter had become the key to my finding a place in the world—outside of this child’s room, far from this motherless, brotherless house, and maybe, incomprehensibly, on the radio, among the voices who’d kept me company throughout eighteen years of speechlessness.

Even then, I understood that my stutter and I would not go on exploiting one another so productively. Long after outliving its utility to anything other than itself, the stutter would be at my throat, awaiting any opportunity to take its sadistic pleasure at the expense of everything that mattered to me.