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Audrey was a stocky, thick-limbed girl in her twenties, though she was nowhere near as fat as her father. She had a lot of tattoos on her biceps and a round, pretty face. She spoke quickly and cuttingly in a sharp, nasal voice, and her eyes spent a lot of time sardonically rolling around in her head. She tended the bar at Artie’s and let Leon drink for free if her boss—Artie himself—was not present, though she hinted that Artie tacitly suspected this and did not much mind. It was clear that Audrey loved her father, but in the world-wise and resigned way in which children who are more mature than their parents sometimes do; that is, they may choose to love them honestly and deeply even though their love is darkened somewhat by the resentment that their parents’ irresponsibility by necessity pushed them too early into taking care of themselves; but she loved him, anyway. Leon ordered more beer, and then it was late and I was drunk, the restaurant was empty and the houselights had come on, and we had to go. The next day we began to rehearse our performances of Shakespeare.

When I met him Leon Smoler was a great and brilliant and unpromising and utter failure. He’d spent a lifetime perfecting failure almost to an art form. He had failed at many arts. He was a failed director, a failed actor, a failed writer, a failed musician, a failed photographer, a failed housepainter, a failed gravedigger, a failed commercial fisherman, a failed substitute high school teacher, a Princeton University dropout, an avowed alcoholic, a dishonorably discharged veteran, and a three-time divorcé. A Renaissance man, a jack-of-all-trades, and a master of few. He was fifty years old when I met him. He’d thus far spent his life pinging around like a pinball from one elaborate catastrophe to the next. He had once directed an off-off-Broadway production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed entirely in the nude. He lived in Los Angeles for a while, working as a set painter. Life in Hollywood fizzled out and he moved back to New York, where he founded a theatre company to produce his own plays, which he wrote in accordance with Artaud’s manifesto on the Theatre of Cruelty. This feat of entrepreneurial derring-do also ended in ignominious bankruptcy. He had played Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Shylock, Brutus, Falstaff. He had been stabbed to death many times over, as Polonius, as Claudius, as Banquo, as Julius Caesar. Somewhere in all that Leon got married and divorced three times, though none of these marriages lasted more than a few years. He has two grown children from different marriages, Audrey and Oliver (both named after Shakespearean characters), to whom he was a permissive and incompetent father. Oliver lived far away and seldom saw his father, whom he resented, but Audrey lived nearby with her girlfriend and worked behind the bar at Artie’s. On that particular day in March when I met him, he had been busking Shakespearean monologues on the subway because he had recently been sacked (for insubordination) from his job as a bus driver. Following his sacking he had liberated the Henry VIII costume from the dressing room of a theatre company to which he still had an illegally copied key, and went to work.

“It was not stealing, because it is impossible to ‘steal’ a possession unneeded by its possessor,” he said. “They could not possibly have needed it, because it would never have fit anyone but me. I played Henry VIII in a spectacularly wretched production of that deservedly underproduced play a year or two ago. The costume was designed to my specifics and would never fit another human being. Therefore, by virtue of my physiognomy, it is rightfully mine.” He invented a name for his one-man theatre company—the Shakespeare Underground—and took to the trains, riding them all day, yo-yoing up and down along the length of Manhattan and undulating back and forth across the breadth of it, walking from one train compartment to the next, shaking his