Alley Auditions

Cold Open

BOILWATCH ALERT

HUMIDITY: 83%

CONFLICT LEVELS: ELEVATED

RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT MAKE LIFE DECISIONS TODAY

Mikey Macaroni, nineteen, was halfway down Marinara Row at ten to five in the morning, in his one ironed shirt, on his way to the biggest life decision he had ever made, when his phone told him not to make it. He walked faster.

The shirt had been ironed by his mother the night before, without a single question, which with his mother was its own kind of question, and it was a size too big, so it moved half a second after he did. Round his neck hung a lanyard that said MACHATTAN SCHOOL FOR PASTA ARTS. It was the only badge anyone had ever issued him. He wore it everywhere, as proof that he had once been expected somewhere.

Under his arm was the folder. He had checked it on the stairs, at the door, and under the streetlamp on the corner of Broth Street, and he checked it again now, walking, one item at a time. A certificate from the Machattan School for Pasta Arts, which said in gold leaf that came off on his thumb that he had attended. A letter from the same school about money, which he did not need to open, because he knew the figure on it to the cent, and he was not going to say it to himself before five in the morning. A résumé, folded into eighths, so that it would fit in his shirt pocket if anyone took the folder away from him, which nobody had ever tried to do.

He had come the long way, round the block by Broth Street and back down Marinara Row, so that he would arrive as a candidate instead of a neighbor, and so that nobody at the window over the pharmacy would see him go. Nobody at the window over the pharmacy was awake. He had checked that too.

He turned the corner onto Salt Street, and there was the line.

It came out of the alley between the walk-up and the Trattoria, under the block’s one amber streetlamp, and ran along the sidewalk toward him, and it was already longer than the one he had lain in the dark picturing at half past three, when his alarm went off. At the alley’s mouth, on the walk-up’s brick, where the whole street could read it, hung a hand-painted sign:

CREW CASTING CALL — APPLY WITHIN
Protection Plus is expanding. Are YOU ready to protect?

Mikey was ready. He had been ready since Tuesday. He had set the alarm for half past three to be first, and he counted the line as he walked up it, and he was thirty-eighth.

Thirty-seven people had wanted it more, or owned louder alarms. Some of them held résumés in plastic sleeves. Two near the front were sharing a pen, which meant only one of them could look employable at a time. Somebody by the alley’s mouth was doing nervous stretches, slowly, like a man who had once been told it helped and was still waiting for it to. They all watched Mikey go past, because he was walking the wrong way along it, and he said “Excuse me” to each of them, which was a lot of excuse for five in the morning.

He walked on up into the alley anyway, to make sure it was the line. Everybody did.

The alley ended in a covered loading bay behind the Trattoria: a tarp roof on scaffold poles, a folding table, and a dented dock with one bulb over it. On the brick behind the table hung a shower curtain lettered in marker: PROTECTION PLUS. In front of the shower curtain sat Louie Lasagna, twenty-four, with all the energy of a Semolina 500 CEO interviewing for an unpaid internship. Beside him a ring light stood on its stand, switched off, like a guest nobody had introduced.

“Excuse me,” Mikey said. “Is this the line?”

A short, square ravioli standing beside the table looked up from a clipboard. He had several clipboards, a whistle on a lanyard, and a pair of reading glasses his eyes had never asked for, which he pushed up with one finger before he answered, so the answer would be official.

“This is the table,” said Ralphie Ravioli, who was twenty-seven and had been there since a quarter past four. “The line is the line.”

Mikey looked back down the alley at the line. It looked back at him.

Louie leaned toward Ralphie. “Look at this turnout. This is MOMENTUM. This is SCALE.”

Mikey stood up straighter, because he was part of the scale.

“Should I start processing applicants?” Ralphie asked.

Louie did not look round. “Let them wait. Anticipation builds value.”

He adjusted his suit jacket, a navy pinstripe cut for a man two promotions ahead of him. It did not fit right. It never had.

Mikey filed it away as advice. You made people wait, and the waiting made you worth more. He had been waiting all year, and he was still working out who that had made worth more when Louie drummed four fingers on the folding table, glanced at the line, glanced at the shower curtain, and lasted about three seconds.

He called it down the alley: “NEXT APPLICANT.”

At the very front of the line a rotini got up out of a folding chair. It was a good chair, with a cushion and a sticker on the back that said PROPERTY OF THE PARTY STORE, MARINARA ROW, because she owned the party store and had rented it to herself. She had been sitting in it, the line would tell everybody all morning, since twenty to four. Mikey stepped aside to let her through, which put his back against the Trattoria’s crates, and she sat down across the folding table from Louie Lasagna and folded her hands on her bag.

Louie leaned back. “Tell me about yourself. And make it quick. I’m a BUSY man.”

His phone lay face up on the table by his hand, where everyone could see how busy he was. It showed zero notifications.

Chapter One — One Foot for Each Broom

Mikey Macaroni walked back down the line to his place, and two more people had joined behind it, so now he had a place in both directions.

From the middle of Salt Street you could see all of it, which was the one advantage of standing in the middle of Salt Street. One lane of cobbles ran from Marinara Row to Broth Street, sweating already, with a white line down its exact center that nobody on the block would own up to painting. At the Marinara Row end, on opposite corners, stood Nonna’s Pasta Shop and Lao Lao’s Noodle Shop, whose owners had stood facing each other across that paint for sixty years without once being caught looking.

This morning the line came out of the alley’s mouth, ran west along the north sidewalk past the walk-up’s stoop and bent carefully round Nonna’s door. At the corner a laminated sign on a broom handle said LINE CONTINUES ACROSS THE STREET. YES, ACROSS., and the line did as it was told. It crossed between the two shops and ran back east along the south side, past Lao Lao’s heavy door, to the launderette, where its tail stopped short of the colander dome. Beyond the dome and the papered bakery stood the pharmacy on the Broth Street corner, with its shutter down. His mother would roll it up at eight.

Thirty-eighth turned out to be the middle of the street. Mikey stood on the painted line, exactly between the two doors, on a spot of the block where nobody stood for long, and he planned to stand there for three hours.

At a quarter past five the rotini came back from the bay with her chair and told the man behind her that she had been pre-screened. Her name was Trish. The word went down the line from mouth to mouth. The man behind Trish said it with respect. A tall spaghetti further back said it as a question. A linguine doing nervous lunges on the walk-up’s stoop said it between lunges, in two halves. By the time it reached the corner, pre-screened was a status, and the line said it the way people said salaried.

Behind Mikey now stood a tall cannelloni holding a headshot flat against his chest, like a ticket he intended to contest. He was an actor. He said so before he said anything else.

“She’s pre-screened,” the actor told Mikey, in a voice built for announcing births.

“What does it mean?” Mikey asked.

“It means she’s been screened,” the actor said. “Before.”

Mikey nodded. He wanted to be pre-screened more than he had wanted most things that year, and the year had been mainly wanting.

A bucatini three places back was scraping the last courier-app sticker off his bag with a house key, and when the casarecce in front of him asked what had happened he said “Paused,” and the casarecce stopped asking. The casarecce wore a lanyard from the Machattan School for Pasta Arts, and so did a mafaldine two places ahead, who saw Mikey’s and gave it a small, tired salute. Our graduates are everywhere, the School’s car cards promised on every train Mikey had ever ridden, and here were three of them in one line, waiting for a man with a shower curtain.

Near the alley a penne in a bike helmet kept glancing back at the street like someone planning a route. And somewhere up ahead an elderly orzo in a cardigan was asking anyone who would listen whether they knew about dental. Nobody knew about dental. He asked again further up.

The walk-up’s door opened at half past five, and Tony Tortellini, twenty-one, came down the stoop sideways, on his way to an early move. He looked at the line with real hope.

“Is it a moving crew?” Tony asked the linguine, who was mid-lunge.

“Protection,” the linguine said.

“Is there lifting?”

The linguine considered it. “There’s a whistle.”

Tony’s folds came down one after another from the top, like awnings being lowered for the night. “Oh,” he said. He found Mikey on the painted line and said the rest to him in particular. “Then good luck.”

A window banged up on the second floor, and Mr. Tortellini Sr., sixty-one, put his head out, pointed straight up, and addressed the sky.

“TONY!” he shouted. “That one’s been following the line since four!”

Tony was already walking. “Okay, Pop.”

Mikey looked up. There was a cloud over the block, a long low gray one, sitting directly over the line. He decided not to have an opinion about it.

At half past six both shop doors opened at the same second.

Out of Nonna’s Pasta Shop came Nonna, seventy-nine, with a tray of baked ziti squares on the good platter. Out of Lao Lao’s Noodle Shop came Lao Lao, seventy-nine, with a tray of scallion noodle cakes and the good chopsticks. Neither looked at the other. Each had a card propped on her tray in her own hand. Each tray, by the account of the woman carrying it, was the better tray, and the other was barely a tray at all.

The first person in line between their two doors was Mikey.

Both trays arrived in front of him at once, from opposite sides of the painted line.

“Mangia,” Nonna said.

“Lái, chī,” Lao Lao said, in the same second.

Mikey looked from the ziti to the noodle cakes and back. He had grown up on this block. There was no right answer here, only a wrong answer and a different wrong answer, so he took one of each, one in each hand, and said thank you twice, once in each direction. Nonna went on up the north half of the line. Lao Lao went on down the south half. Neither had looked at him for longer than it took to be sure he had taken hers.

He read the cards aloud to the actor, whose hands were full of headshot. Nonna’s said FREE FOR THE LINE. THE ORIGINAL. EVERYTHING ELSE IS A COPY. Lao Lao’s said COMPLIMENTARY. FOR THE LINE. SERVED HERE FIRST, AS ALWAYS.

“That last part’s doing a lot of work,” the actor said.

The line split by tray at the painted line. The north half ate ziti and the south half ate noodle cakes, and inside a minute both halves were leaning across the paint to compare, which was how the arguments started. A rice noodle on the north half said the ziti alone was worth getting up at four. A rigatoni on the south half said nobody who had tasted a scallion cake would say that. A farfalle who had traded half of hers across the paint said she could see both sides, and both sides told her to stay out of it.

Mikey ate both. He had a favorite. He was going to take it to his grave, or at least to the interview.

At seven o’clock both doors opened again, at the same second, and the grandmothers came out with brooms.

They swept from their own doors toward the painted line, Nonna with her back to Lao Lao and Lao Lao with her back to Nonna, in long strokes that met nowhere. As each broom came, the applicants lifted their feet in turn, a wave running ahead of the bristles down each half of the line.

Mikey was on the painted line. Nonna’s broom reached his left shoe at the exact moment Lao Lao’s reached his right. He lifted the left for Nonna. He lifted the right for Lao Lao. For one second neither foot was on Salt Street, and two old women swept the place where he had been. Then he came down, and there was a little ridge of dust round each of his shoes, and the dust from Nonna’s side and the dust from Lao Lao’s side were the same gray.

Two minutes later a dark sedan came down Salt Street from Marinara Row at a walking pace, which nothing on Salt Street ever did, and stopped at the crossing with its front bumper almost touching Mikey’s shins.

Behind the windshield sat a tall smooth tube cut clean on the diagonal, with a pencil behind his ear. He did not honk. He did not wave. He looked at nothing Mikey could find, without blinking, like a meter that had already started running.

“Sorry,” Mikey said to the car.

The line opened for it. The sedan rolled through the gap, went on down the block, and parked in front of the shuttered bakery, where nobody was allowed to park. The engine stopped. Nobody got out.

His phone buzzed at ten past seven. His mother counted pills for half the block, and she counted everything else as well, and this morning she had counted the apartment: Shirt, gone. Lanyard, gone. Son, gone. Where.

He typed his answer with both thumbs, as carefully as a form: Hi Mom. I am at an opportunity. I will explain later. Then he signed it with his full name, Mikey Macaroni, as he signed everything.

The reply came before he had put the phone away. It was one word.

Michael.

He turned the phone face down.