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By Root 675 0

One afternoon, Aaron took me up to his office, a big, empty room with a table and a few books. A workman stopped by to ask, “What time would you like me to start up every morning?” Aaron shook his head in amazement; it was some kind of miracle. Aaron accepted miracles with the same good humor, almost the same fatalism, he brought to fiascos; it was precisely the fact that anything could happen that Aaron relished about his peculiar corner of show business. It was hard to imagine that Richie Basciano could take Aaron’s blueprint seriously, but Aaron believed in himself too much to wonder that someone else would, too. “When I look back someday and see what I’ve accomplished over fifty years,” he said—on this particular day his thinning, straggly hair was covered by an incongruously rakish black beret— “I could have had no better apprenticeship than with Richie.”

ACT III

ONE AFTERNOON IN T HE first week of May 2002, I walked up to the third floor to see Aaron and noticed, in an adjacent cubbyhole, an entirely unlikely figure, a man of about fifty dressed in a white shirt and tie, a pen clipped to his pocket, his silver hair combed straight back. Aaron said, “Would you like to meet our general manager?”—and just like that, the silver-haired man walked in. His name was Marc Barbanell. Marc began talking in a strangely indirect fashion about how Richard Basciano—not “Richie,” as Aaron called him—had organized and amplified and modernized and so forth the “concept” downstairs. I noticed he never used the word “sex” in connection with the concept. He talked about a “longtime association” with Richard, though in a “private, personal capacity.” Now, he said, he had been asked to join “the corporate side of the organization. ” He was, himself, a “corporate” person. He proved this point by using elaborate metaphors about pulling the trigger, and not going beyond the water’s edge, and so on. “You could say that I’m the vehicle,” he said, and now for the first time he looked at Aaron—he was the vehicle to ensure that the enterprise succeeded in regard to dollars and cents. That didn’t necessarily sound like a positive development. And in fact, when it came to the bottom line, Marc wasn’t the least bit ambivalent. “I am under serious profit pressure from Richard,” he announced. He talked about thirty-day, sixty-day, ninety-day “time frames.”

There may have been some setting in which Marc Barbanell wouldn’t have seemed out of place—a scene from George S. Kaufman’s hallucinatory Beggar on Horseback, for example—but at Todo Con Nada Show World he stood out like a unicorn, or like a unicorn in a suit. I immediately followed Marc back to his cubbyhole, where I found that he had busied himself with paperwork. He had a beeper clipped to his pocket. I asked Marc whether he thought I might be able to talk to Mr. Basciano. This provoked another monologue: this is an organization that plays close to the vest, that operates according to certain principles, that is not interested in celebrity . . . Marc said that the organization received “requests” from a wide variety of sources—“Air Force One—”

“Air Force One?”

“Yes; Richard’s response was that he was not interested.” In what? Marc wouldn’t say. The cryptic drone resumed: “We will make a determination as to whether this opportunity fits with our organizational goals . . .” I finally excused myself and backed out the door. I went over to Aaron’s office and gave him a skeptical waggle of the eyebrows. Aaron said, “Marc is a corporate person.” He appeared not to be joking, which I took to be a bad sign.

The next time I saw Marc, in early June, he explained that he had agreed to talk to me, though Richard would not. He said that he, Marc, had just booked a new play, Hopscotch—“a real uppity play, attracts a nice, clean, uppity crowd, kind of a midweek, clean-cut dating crowd.” This didn’t sound very much like the audience for Pervy Verse, not to mention for nonpornographic video booths. Then I noticed that Aaron’s door was locked. “He went out,” Marc said brusquely. “I ruffled his feathers.