A Bed in the Sticks Read online

  I worked hard to be good in my parts, meaning that I really worked to get inside the head of my character, find his feelings and whatever little surprises he might reveal, good or bad, that would add to any performance when delivered with a good heart and the proper study of the character.

  I finally woke up on day and realised that what went on with Gary and Maria was fuelled by their belief that they were top of the tree thespians, the best actually.

  This shocked me to such a degree that I had to talk to Jimmy about it with some kind of open mind. Maybe they were in some kind of zone that you can only find it you have the kind of experience they had earned - there was no denying they had been on the boards forever. Considering this I was willing to accept I might be way over the top in my view but decided that, even though it might make me look foolish, I would grab Jimmy and see if he could help me.

  I was sure of what that my boss was a talented -pro, and I respected him for his talent and his know-how, not forgetting his people skills, so I asked him if we could grab some time while I told him about my predicament.

  Hearing that it was about Gary and Maria, he chuckled and admitted without a demur: ‘Thank Christ, that’s all it is. For a minute I thought you might be heading back to Dublin.’

  I laughed and he went on: ‘Living in the sticks can do a number on a guy, and you are so city. He chuckled: ‘I admit it right here and now, I would have done whatever it took to keep you here. You have real talent and I honestly think you can go places, and I mean places worth going to, but, not just yet.’

  I told him about the upstaging, particularly by Maria and he nodded his head. ‘I’ve seen it and I’ve spoken to both of them, and I will again, only I’ll get heavier. Just don’t take off on me. Right now I admit that it’s Pauline and May and You that, to my mind, are holding the show together right now. Gary is a gem in a couple of plays but basically, he is bollixed, as in worn not. So hang in there and let me have some more words with the faulty paid. Ok?’

  Satisfied for the moment, I wondered what the show would be like if either Gary or Maria was fired. I cut the scenario, know that if the old girl went, her daughter would have to go too. This bothered me - like me right now, both women needed the job or they wouldn’t have been sleeping in the broken down caravan they owned, and, in a moment, I was half wishing I hadn’t said anything that would mean they got the elbow from Jimmy. I even thought I’d go back to him and ask him to forget the complaint, but, I just let the hare sit.

  As it turned out, nothing changed for several months, though thankfully the spring was kind enough that I was able to get more and more walking done. This was important to me since I liked to stay reasonably fit, and it was also handy for me as I learned more and more scripts, calling them over to myself alone, while at night I gained more and more experience as my worth to the company expanded, the combination helping me feel overall, very contented.

  10

  I was paying Jimmy ten shilling a week against the five pounds he had loaned me to buy a suit on the day we had hired the hall from Mr. Craig.

  I’d wanted the suit the moment I laid eyes on it and by helping me buy it, Jimmy had also sweetened Craig. His bigger show was on the main street and he had been behind the counter the first time we went in there.

  Jimmy had played him gently with just a hint of Northern Ireland in his regular accent which tended to lean towards the one best suited to the town we were playing. He also dropped in the name of the other Mister Craig in Enniskillen, implying he had bought clothes there a couple of years earlier.

  When he copped on that I was seriously interested in a corn-coloured corduroy suit, and, before I knew what was happening, Mr. Craig was helping me into the jacket.

  I looked in the full length mirror and it turned out to be a perfect fit. The pants were just right too, and as Mister Craig tied up the parcel, Jimmy tied up the deal for the village hall.

  On our second Sunday in the town, with business very good indeed, we quietly loaded up the car and a small trailer and one car at a time, we slipped away to Kilbeg, a Catholic town situated about fifteen miles from Haylingbrook.

  Jimmy had arranged with the Parish Priest to do a single show that night, and we arrived just in time to hear him give his midday Mass congregation the relevant information. He told his congregation that he expected them to support the show, which was the best in good, clean Irish entertainment. He also said that the play ‘Noreen Bawn’ was alone, worth the admission fee and he carried on at some length about the talent of the artistes.

  What he didn’t mention was the fact that he was on fifty per cent of the take, but then, knowing them better than we did, he probably knew that his congregation had enough on their minds, without bothering them with dreary financial details.

  After Mass we went into the hall with the priest, and, like Jimmy, I tried to give the impression that I was a daily Mass goer and Communicant.

  I didn’t like Father Mackey; his tiny piggy eyes shone too brightly when he considered how much the take would be; but then I wouldn’t have liked him had he been a publican or a bricklayer.

  He watched us suspiciously as we hung up our curtains and brought in the Gauze Flat for the show-stopping effect at the end of the Noreen play. At one moment I felt he was watching us suspiciously, giving me the impression that he expected us to steal something, but I reasoned that he probably didn’t think that at all. He just looked suspicious because that’s how his face was built, and like the rest of us he couldn’t help, overall, the way he looked.

  In fairness to the man, he was exactly the same as he shared the take with Jimmy after the show, which had been a sell-out despite the size of the huge church hall.

  ‘A month there,’ Jimmy said to me as we drove back to Hayling Brook, the other cars in a crocodile behind us. ‘Just a month, with him hustling the parishioners, God, there’d be a right few quid in that.’

  ‘Can you book it for a few weeks?’

  ‘Not really, Tony. They use it three times a week for different things, classes, choir practice. Still, we can get the odd Sunday out of it. Helps, I can tell you.’

  As it turned out, we did two more One Night Stands for Father Mackey, and on both Sunday mornings, Jimmy drove us over to hang up the curtains. I stood at the back of the church and I listened to the priest advertising the show. He was so anxious to pack them in, to get a good lump as his share of the take, that I don’t think he even knew just how much he had exaggerated the worth of the show. And though he didn’t actually order his parishioners to go, he slanted his ‘commercial’ in such a way that they didn’t have all that much choice.

  To be honest, I wanted to puke, even more so as I saw them filing into the hall for each show. It had to be a bad thing for a man, just an ordinary man in a white collar and a dark suit, to have that much power over so many people. It’s possible that a lot of them would have come to see the show anyway, but I feel sure we wouldn’t have packed them in as we did, if Father Mackay hadn’t given us such a fantastic plug from the pulpit.

  Those visits to the church in Kilbeg reminded me that I hadn’t been inside ‘a house of prayer’ since the day of my kid brother Larry’s funeral. I’d been so sickened that day that I swore never to go again, and what I saw and heard in Kilbeg only strengthened my resolve to stick to my guns. Churches were out, unless somebody was getting hitched and I had to put in an appearance or go without the drink at the reception afterwards.

  ------

  ‘It’s a bastard when the wind gets under them’ Jimmy sniffed as I got back into the car.

  I wiped paste from my face, hating the gluey feeling of it on my skin. ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘I’ve always hated it myself, but you’d be surprised the way it helps.’

  We were bill-posting and though, according to the calendar, we were in mid-April, the weather was
one hundred per cent March and I was cold, very cold. But, that wasn’t the worse of it. The wind that was whipping across the country had chapped my hands and my face and the edges of my eyelids were stinging sore. And my feet were wet thanks to stepping in a puddle of water the second time I got out of the car. As a rule, Jimmy would have pasted every other bill, but, he had hurt his back, so I was lumbered to do them all. And I didn’t like it one little bit.

  Nothing was sacred when it came to bill-posting. Walls, lamp-posts, barn doors, trees, if you could get a bill to stay on; in fact, a fella would have to be careful where he parked his car or he was likely to wind up advertising Gay Time for Jimmy Frazer.

  A Play Bill measured two feet six inches long by twelve inches across, with a combination of red and green lettering on a yellow background. And each one screamed out at the passerby, begging him to consider what he was missing by not seeing the “The Two Shows for The Price of One’ packet deal that Jimmy Frazer was presenting at the village hall on such a date. And the titles were enough to stop a gravedigger on his way to work. About thirty in all...Lady Audleys Secret..The Wearing of the Green...Bought and Paid For...Temptation... His Mother’s Rosary (a dodgy one, only performed below the Border)..Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn...Pal of My Cradle Days...East Lynn and a host of other wonderful dramas for your pleasure and entertainment.

  Under each title, a scripted caption informed the reader that he might expect ‘A Charming Human Play’... ‘A Play with a Laugh and a Tear’... ‘Thrills and Suspence in the Underworld of...’ The city of this last title changed according to how Jimmy felt about the town we played, and I often said to him that I wondered what he would have called it if a guy had walked in smoking Turkish or Egyptian cigarettes. He used to laugh at that, picturing Maria Maguire playing the part of a Cairo brothel -keeper, with her Miraculous Medal (which she never took off) around her neck.

  Each bill also carried artistes names: Jimmy Frazer (Six Feet of Insanity)...Maria Maguire (For Your Pleasure). I always felt that Jimmy had worked real hard to come up with that one...Gary Martin (King of the Classics)... Tony O’Neill, (Monarch of Melody) - imagine reading that for the first time, and you dying yet from too much drink the night before. Also mentioned was May Mitchell, (A Rare Talent) not to mention her Knockers, and so on and so on. Plus, with Wonderful prizes, raffles and Dance Competitions, plus the mention of Talent Contests with ‘Wonderful Prizes’, so that. all we didn’t promise our audience was that they could take the seats home with them as they left that hall.

  A fair number of the plays we offered had, at least, four different titles, but really, so many of them were the same play, with far too often, the same people playing similar parts, that I reckoned most people had, without even being critical, forgotten what they had seen a few months or a few years earlier.

  For example, Gary who was naturally heavy was always the bad guy. Just one example is ‘The Murder in the Red Barn.’ Gary was the only actor in the company who could ham his way into the killer role, and it’s not unfair to say that, even someone suffering from dementia, would have remembered him as the villain from a previous production, he being such a naturally ham that could shout the barn down with even trying.

  In fairness to Gary, most Fit-Up actors hammed things up because the farmers and cattle dealers and whatever, country people through and through, needed plenty of shouting and screaming and if possible, blood, if they were going to be caught by what was produced onstage. And they got what they paid for.

  The need for The Drama was unlikely to kid anybody that it was really happening. But just in case, the Variety half of the evenings entertainment, was light and bright and breezy, and there was the life belt of the Long Laughable Sketch (to send you home with a smile instead of a tear) to eliminate (we hoped) the likelihood that one or more of our patrons might experience a nightmare, and as a result, not come back for the rest of the week.

  My favourite piano player, Pauline, rarely played a part, so that when I saw her acting for the first time I was knocked out by her natural talent as an actress. I asked Jimmy what was the story there and he just said: ‘She’s a musician who is also a top class actress...she just has no interest in acting.’

  When I finally got around to asking the lady herself - we had never spoken again about my outburst of love some months before - but we had remained good pals - she just ‘I have no interest in performing at the level of our present situation.’

  We got on with my latest vocal rehearsal after that and I just felt grateful to be receiving such wonderful accompaniment from someone I had come to respect with all I had to give.

  As it happened, I was playing more and more parts as the months went by and I was happy to be doing so much because I saw it all in terms of experience. And since Jimmy had given me a ‘don’t you tell anybody’ warning, I said nothing about the extra money, just very grateful that I could refund him ten shillings a week against the cost of the two suits he had bought and paid for, until I was in a position to reimburse him.

  All of Denny’s roles were passed to me and Tom Hunter made no bones about being fed-up about this. I didn’t blame the guy; he had been with Jimmy for two years; but it wasn’t my fault.

  Tom pulled Jimmy on this in my presence, just after I’d been handed a script called ‘The Road to the West. This was one that had not been performed in my time on the tour, so I had no idea what kind of part was there for me. As it turned out, Tom knew the play very well and had always wanted to play the lead in it.

  ‘I don’t think you’re being fair, Jimmy, and that’s just being honest with you.’

  Jimmy nodded and I felt that he was prepared for this.

  ‘You’re entitled to your point of view, Tom but, that doesn’t change anything. I want Tony to play John Murphy.’

  ‘Well, obviously,’ Tom said, his face clouding a bit on the anger he was holding down. It’s an awful pity he can’t tune an engine and handle electricity and all the rest of it, you’d hardly need me at all.’

  ‘Look, Tom, I didn’t take Tony on to tune engines.’

  ‘No, I know you didn’t, you hired him as a singer, didn’t you?’ Tom sucked his lips in, but he’d already said it. He looked at me. ‘I’m sorry, Tony, that was uncalled for.’

  ‘I should fuckin’-well think it was,’ Jimmy sounded disgusted.

  ‘It’s alright,’ I said, ‘there’s no good kidding. I grabbed one audience since I’ve been here and that was in Johnnie Cullen’s boozer.’

  ‘Still and all...’ Tom was really embarrassed.

  ‘As it happens,’ Jimmy interrupted him, ‘I didn’t just hire him a singer. Tony knows that. But I’m not a moron, Tom, and I’m saying he had more than anybody I’ve met in a long time. Like, how would you feel, going on night after night and dying the death?’

  ‘I know,’ Tom acknowledged with a nod of his head.

  ‘Well, I don’t think you do know.’ Jimmy’s voice was calm but his eyes were blazing. ‘He’s a Pro! A Born Pro! And though you were born in a wagon, your people performing for years, that’s something you’re not...’

  ‘Jimmy!’ I didn’t want to be the cause of a row, so I tried to stop him.

  He held up his hand, stopping me. ‘No. Hang on a mo’ Tony! Tom wants to air the situation. Right, Tom?’

  Tom nodded. ‘Go on, spit it out!’

  ‘You can play parts, I’m not denying that but, Tony happens, to my mind, to be an actor. I didn’t know that for sure when he joined but, I felt he had it in him. And he drags the girls in...they come back again and again, to see him. I knew that when I hired him, his looks alone were worth his wages. And whether he can tune an engine or not, he’s done everything else that I’ve asked him to do, and what’s more, he’s tried to do it properly. And apart from any of this, it’s up to me to decide who plays what...I pay the wages and that makes me the bos
s. That’s it, Tom. Okay!’

  Tom looked for some moments at Jimmy, nodding his head finally, while I was wishing fervently that I was anywhere but where I was. I liked Tom Hunter and I had no wish to see his pride take the beating that Jimmy had first given it.

  ‘At least we know where we stand,’ Tom said. He looked at me: ‘No hard feelings, Tony.’

  ‘Course not, Tom. I’m not a kid!’

  Tom tapped my upper arm with his fist. ‘No, I’ll give you that.’

  Pauline helped me learn the part of John Murphy, which was good because she made me work so hard, but it was even better because I had a legitimate excuse to spend lot of time alone with her in her wagon. I didn’t touch her and she gave me no indication that she wanted me, but it was a thrill all the same, just to be sitting there by her side, with the script in front of us on that table.

  On the last afternoon before the play, I knew that I would be word perfect and I told her how grateful I was for her help. I was putting on my coat, looking at her as she raised the table and clipped it to the wall. She was wearing a pale blue jumper and slacks of a deeper blue and her eyes seemed deep as a well.

  She picked up a cigarette and I moved to light it for her. Her eyes were on my face and I took her in my arms and kissed her on the mouth. It was a pure, love kiss, and not one of those sexy, spit-swapping connections that May handed out.

  I let Pauline go, and though I was relieved that she wasn’t angry, I was disappointed at the lack of any kind of reaction. Anger would have been positive, at least.

  ‘You’re the most beautiful pianist I’ve ever seen,’ I said, trying to sound casual.

  She smiled. ‘Does that include Fat Charlie?’

  I nodded, ‘and Bangers Byrne.’