I did have friends among the more prosaically named pupils, and one of them was a deeply weird child who became my closest friend. Every day we went to “art class”, wherein we were free to sketch whatever our twisted little hearts desired, and every day my friend and I would race enthusiastically to that class to draw what we called “jerks”. Jerks were people with the most obscenely malformed features we could imagine. The kind of illustrations that would have made Basil Wolverton proud. It was about a year later when we were in Mrs. Rubin’s second grade class that DC Comics published their competitor to MAD magazine, entitled Plop! With covers and interior art by Wolverton and the legendary Wally Wood, Plop! featured the kind of art that was precisely what we had aspired to create ourselves. We were obviously visionaries.

A few years later I switched schools, leaving my jerk-loving friend behind, and traded P.S. 116 on Toidy Toid and Toid for “The Little Red Schoolhouse” on Bleecker street and 6th avenue; a progressive school with the most sickeningly saccharine name imaginable. Students there were mercilessly preyed upon by bullies from the local public schools, and I can’t say that I blame them. Any kid who attends a school called “The Little Red Schoolhouse” is practically getting on their knees and begging for a noogie, if not a wedgie.

While my new fifth-grade class (called “the Tens” at The Little Red School House, because twee is the way to be at LRSH) contained its share of misfits, the only other member of the class who even came close to my quota of quirkiness was a girl who wore a dog collar to school every day. She and I never became really close, but we did share a mutual respect. A few years later, after everyone in our class had taken the test to gain admission to one of the city’s prestigious specialized public high schools, my dog-collared friend and I were the only members of our class who achieved top honors allowing admittance to Stuyvesant High School, the most esteemed of New York City’s public high schools, and among the most distinguished high schools in the nation. Take that, normies.

As a freshman at Stuyvesant I quickly made a friend who was not particularly unusual, but he introduced me to a friend of his at Friends Seminary (again with with the cutesy names), a Quaker school down the street from Stuyvesant. This fellow was a drummer in a punk rock band, and he had a manic energy that one would attribute to someone who had been chugging Red Bulls all day, though it would be years before that noxious beverage came into existence. While he was sufficiently bizarre for me, there was another group of students whom I gravitated to immediately. These became some of my lifelong friends, and years later, in recognition of our status as aberrations and outsiders, we dubbed ourselves the Mutants.

The first of the Mutants I encountered at Friends was Lord Odinmank (I shall refer to them by their nicknames or gamer tags to protect the innocent and the guilty), and we hit it off right away, both of us being rabid comic book fans. Lord Odinmank is easily the most knowledgeable of the Mutants, a polyglot and historian who has traveled the world extensively, and whom I consider to be a living Rosetta Stone. He speaks and reads about twenty languages to some degree, including nearly ten dead ones. He is a professor of Latin, German, and History. He has been known to recite the Iliad in the original Ancient Greek from memory. He not only boasts the most extensive and impressive collection of Avengers comic books that I’ve ever seen, but he is also the wielder of the Manky Paw, one of the most powerful magic totems known to man.

The next Mutant I met is my bestie, RedAnt. An immigrant from the Soviet Union who had studied piano at the Leningrad Conservatory of Music since the age of five, and has since learned to play virtually every musical instrument besides percussion and wind instruments (but no doubt that’s only because he hadn’t taken the time to master those as well). Over the course of his career as a composer, musician, audio engineer, and producer, he has garnered two Grammy Awards, recorded his own album, and has worked with a range of musical artists that include OutKast, Kanye West, Carlos Santana, and Mick Jagger. He is also the most badass chess player I have ever known outside of his father. Inside of his father it’s too dark to play chess (apologies to Groucho).

Perhaps the most swashbuckling of the group, there is The King of Corsica; an actor, writer, and director of theater, a prolific fantasy illustrator of extraordinary talent, and an incurable romantic. Many of my best-loved stories feature The King, but the tale of our meeting is among my favorites.

At Stuyvesant there were quite a number of hippie freaks who hung out in the local park, mostly older students who were impressively deft in their use of recreational drugs, and they dressed as if they were meant to be on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Accordingly, they referred to themselves as “the Stuy Freaks”. One of them was The King’s girlfriend at the time, and one day she invited me to a party at her place, a lovely loft apartment in downtown Manhattan. Most of the attendees were older than I was, and I knew scant few of them. I remember that there was a magnificent long oak table ringed by beautifully ornate matching high-backed chairs, and several of the freaks were sitting around it while a lavishly garbed man with tinted glasses, long wavy black hair, and a style of facial hair that smacked of Dr. Strange sat at the head of the table, holding court. He looked like a rock star, and projected the same confidence. Ever the busy body, I came and sat at one of the empty seats.

“YOU! Did I say you could sit at the table? Begone with you!”, roared The King, in a playful yet regal manner, so I took his words to heart and went to find a beer. As with most parties I went to in those days, everyone drank themselves into a stupor and ended up crashing out wherever there was room on the floor. Whenever I drink (a rare occurrence these days) I find it hard to sleep, and I usually wake up as the sun rises, if not before. On this occasion I had found myself a fairly secluded part of the apartment to pass out in and I was awake long before anyone else. Save one.

“Now how can I fuck with all these sleeping hippies?” mused The King aloud as he tip-toed around the slumbering bohemians (Though he sported an impressive head of long hair himself, he derided hippies and their attendant culture).

“If you dip their fingers in warm water they’ll piss themselves,” I offered from my perch across the spacious room.

He points at me with a look of wide-eyed astonishment on his face. “YOU! I like you. What’s ya name?” The King is from Queens, and as they say, you can take the boy out of Flushing, but you can’t take Flushing out of the boy. At least I think they say that. We became friends on the spot.

The King is about four years my senior, and in a way he took me under his wing, exposing me to the music of Peter Gabriel and Genesis, Robert Fripp and King Crimson, Bill Nelson and Be-Bop Deluxe. I was enthralled. I am something of a music nerd in general, but progressive rock is my comfort music.

There are a number of ancillary members of the Mutant clan, notably Hawk Phlegm, a writer, graduate school professor, and a scholar of the works of James Joyce. He has since left the world of academia behind and is now a shipwright on the East Coast. He is a master of backgammon and an avid fan of cheese and the music of Jimi Hendrix. Alternately staid and silly, he will engage in spirited discussions of literary works or music, then for his own entertainment he will bark at doormen on the street. While he would likely not self identify as a Mutant himself, he is nonetheless a friend to us all, and without question the most accomplished drinker of the lot, no mean feat in and of itself.

Lastly, there is my old friend from P.S. 116, whom I shall refer to as LTD. Like Hawk Phlegm, he is not a gamer, and thus bears no gamer tag, nor does he consider himself an official Mutant, but he is very much a cherished friend to the rest of us. We were reunited when I discovered that we had a mutual friend at Friends who invited us both to his home one day. I remember the occasion well as it was also the first time I heard Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. LTD and I hit it off again immediately, and thereafter I spent many afternoons hanging out in his room perfecting our air guitar, air bass, and air drum routines for albums like Abbey Road and Frank Zappa’s brilliantly absurd rock opera Joe’s Garage. There may also have been some marijuana involved, but I really can’t remember. Likely because we smoked so much.

To this day, LTD is the most amazingly talented artist I have ever known, in a variety of mediums, jerks or otherwise. The first time I came to his apartment as a teenager and entered his room, I was floored by the unbelievable array of six inch figures made from colorful Caran d’Ache modeling clay sitting atop his dresser. There were dozens of them in a galaxy of colors— jerks made flesh; clowns, indigents, monsters, doctors, dragons, monkeys, wombats, mothers in mumus with curlers in their hair poised to strike with rolling pins gripped in their tiny detailed hands, and many, many more (I’m not sure about the wombats, but I wanted to illustrate the variety of characters on display). A graphic designer by trade, he is now a prodigious painter, having created a bountiful series of breathtaking images in a wide variety of styles, including abstract, impressionist, realist, and minimalist, many of them hauntingly and inexplicably familiar. If he will allow to me to do so, I will post a link to his website for you to see his brilliant pieces of art (He did! Go look at his amazing work here).

As the youngest member of the gang, I was always “the kid”, and I couldn’t be more proud to be part of a group that includes such amazingly talented freaks. We have a standard salutation that Lord Odinmank first heard being chanted by an indigenous tribe somewhere in South America, and so I shall close with that:

Juyayay!

Profound and profane apologies to one and all. I have a confession to make. This is difficult for me to say, and I truly hope you won’t think any less of me, but…

<sigh>

I have been employed.

I know, I know. I’m a sellout. I’ve betrayed my ideals. I’ve caved to the man. What was I thinking?

Employment is a genuinely awful practice, and habit forming besides. I just hope you are all strong enough to stop yourselves from succumbing to the siren song of success (be advised that my alliteration is absolutely authentic and was assembled absent AI).

In addition to that (that’s right. It gets worse), I was invited to be a guest at The Best Flippin’ Card Show in Albany last weekend, and there was a lot of flippin’. Here is a picture of me before I had completely flipped out:

A good time was had by all. Or so they tell me. I was too busy flippin’ cards and hawkin’ autographs. I did get to meet some extraordinary people, but I will save those stories for another time when my brain is not so boneful.

All of that is to say that I have been a busy bonehead. I know I apologized, but I take that back. In fact, I’m rescinding this entire piece. “Never apologize, never explain” has been a mantra of mine ever since I heard it proclaimed by noted sage Phil Donahue while talking about something he didn’t want to explain or apologize for to his wife, Marlo Thomas. I just forgot it was my mantra for a second because Little Rabbit Foo Foo has been playing on a loop in my head all day (please send help).

That said, a new piece is in the works and will be Stacked shortly. I just have to get permission from the people whom I intend to mock and slander in it.

Raging is a terrible way to spend your life. It will kill you quicker, and makes you generally intolerable to the people around you. I’ve always been a big fan of The Batman (the article is important. Without the “the” he’s far less menacing), but I’ve come to realize that The Joker (see what I mean?) is just as admirable. It’s said that the act of smiling alters your disposition, fooling your brain into thinking that you’re happy, so he’s got that going for him. And while The Batman’s discipline and strength of will (not to mention his billions of dollars) is something to strive for, his rage is just stupid, despite the fact that it’s the reason he is who he is. Laughing at the fact that nothing is funny anymore is just as valuable, if not more so. Laughing at little children eating fiberglass thinking that it’s cotton candy isn’t good, but there are limits to everything. The yin-yang thing is true. It’s all about balance. Especially if you’re on a unicycle.

For the last few weeks I’ve been engaging in a morning routine that science has proven will make you a better person, and more importantly, less angry. If you’d like to try it yourself, here’s a link to the article that inspired me. It’s actual science, with studies and big words to back it up. So far it’s allowed me to sleep better at night, and ostensibly it will eventually quell the rage inside me by leveling the amount of cortisol that my glands pour into my brain over the course of the day. Fewer cortisol spikes, less teeth gnashing. The Batman is fueled by cortisol. He’ll die from a heart attack long before any of The Riddler’s clever conundrums will kill him. I’ve also found a way to channel my rage without going on a cross-country kill spree. I’ve started writing about a character who does all the things I’d like to do to the suits and rednecks that are ruining everything for those of us who aren’t greedy or idiotic. I’m hoping to make a book out of it, but I may start SubStacking it with a paid subscription to help pay the mortgage.

I used to (and still do) tell people to jump up and down and bark like a dog when they get stressed out. You can do it literally (which is to say exactly what it means, not “a lot”), but the meaning of the phrase is the key. Life is ridiculous and sad and glorious and stupid and exciting and more or less meaningless, but you shouldn’t get hung up on any of those parts of it. Revel in the banality and make your own meaning for it. I’m not a big fan of those who make pleasing a big invisible omnipotent guy the meaning of it, but whatever floats your boat, as long as you don’t sink anyone else’s.

When I was but a wee lad, my mother and I were walking down 8th street in Manhattan and we saw a sign for a palm reader and fortune teller, and we decided to check it out. In the tiny apartment upstairs, there was an enormous woman with at least one gold-capped tooth whom I once would have called a gypsy, but thanks to my friend Obi, now I know better and shall refer to her as a Roma, even though it’s far more likely that she was Puerto Rican. She looked at my tiny palm and told me this: My lucky day is Wednesday and my lucky number is 16, and on Wednesday the 16th I would receive something important in the mail from school. At the time I went to a public school (on toidy toid and toid no less) and never got anything in the mail from school, but on Wednesday the 16th I received a stapled stack of mimeographed paper that was the closest thing to a literary magazine one would ever get from a public school. On the front page was a story I had written about the life of a super-ball that had begun in a coin-operated bubble gum machine and ended by being chewed up by my friend John Ratke’s dog. Obviously, this meant that writing was my calling, so now on the cusp of turning 60, I’m finally taking that omen seriously and putting words together on a page (or a screen) for (hopefully) the delight of others, and to give my life more meaning. If you think it’s funny, please give me some money, because I refuse to tell people to like and subscribe.

The previous decade was tumultuous to say the least. Our family was forced to move for the seventh time in ten years; my father shuffled off this mortal coil; and Emma and I were separated for quite a while. On the up side I was cast as the voice of Buzz, the Honey Nut Cheerios bee in three commercial spots for one fairly lucrative year, and I was hired by Audible to record what was certainly the most tragic, well-written, and widely read book I’d ever done: Hanya Yanagihara’s seminal work, A Little Life.

At 832 pages, A Little Life took over three weeks to record. It was engineered, directed, and narrated solely by myself. I was honestly surprised that I had been selected as narrator for a book that was short-listed for the Man Booker prize, and was a broad departure from the usual fare of science fiction, fantasy, and humor that I had spent most of my career recording. It is a phenomenally devastating tale of a young man who suffered unspeakable horrors over the course of his life, and the three friends who were his lifeline over the years. I spent a great deal of those three weeks in my booth weeping and sobbing as I read.

The audiobook was met with extraordinary acclaim by listeners, and though I did receive an Earphone award for the recording, it was released too late in the year and was likely too long for all the judges to listen to the entirety of it in time so that it could have been chosen as a candidate for an Audie award at that point (or so I would like to believe). The praise for my performance from listeners was astonishing. Every day I would open the page on Audible.com for an ego boost, with user reviews that included passages such as these:

“Mr. Wyman handled very difficult subject matter with an even hand–or rather, voice. He also stayed out of the way of the text, complimenting the writing rather than dominating it. I so appreciate a subtle narrator.“

“I can’t say enough about Oliver Wyman’s performance. His character’s voices were subtly different from each other, but enough so to convey the personalities of the main characters. His acting itself was tremendously good and created the reality of the story perfectly. His ability to convey the emotions of the book and its characters was key to the quality of this audio book and it’s many opportunities to cause tears to spill and long hours of entranced listening to be spent.”

“I have read the book, but the audio version is even more emotional, as Oliver Wyman delivers the most authentic performance of any book I have ever listened to. His voice is beautiful, and tortured, and his portrayal of my most beloved fictional “friends” will be forever etched in my heart. Listen. To. This. Book. P.S. I know it’s lengthy; don’t utilize the speed-up on this one. It deserves the full 100% cadence of Mr. Wyman’s voice to tell this story.”

“As for the narrator. Oliver Wyman is singularly the best I’ve listened to (and I’ve listened to a lot of narrators). His cadence and tone and pace and his sensitivity to delicate subject matter – I’m in awe. There was not a single moment when I was torn from the narrative by a mispronunciation, misinterpretation, or inappropriate change in pitch to accommodate the novel’s cast. In fact, as soon as I hit “submit” on this review, I’ll search for another book narrated by Wyman.”

It was manna for my soul. I am very glad that I saved those excerpts— for more than one reason, as you will learn shortly.

In 2003, A Little Life was included in the list of The top 100 Audible Essentials of all time, and among the 50 greatest fictional audiobooks. I had not only arrived, but I was indeed met with fanfare and glory upon my arrival.

By that time however, audiobook jobs had started to become scarce for some reason, and when one of my agents left the talent agency that had been representing me I decided to leave with him, which turned out to be a terrible idea. There were far fewer opportunities and auditions for me, and I decided to leave him and his new agency after I was harangued by him over a $20 commission for a short children’s book which he had no role in acquiring for me (As I’ve said before, no agent has ever gotten me an audiobook job. It has always been through offers made directly from publishers and producers due to the merits and experience I have gleaned over the years). I then started working with another agent I knew from the original agency I had signed with which went fairly well, until she left that prestigious agency. For whatever reason that agency decided not to continue representing me after her departure, likely because most of the work I got were narration gigs, and even though I said I would happily give them commission for that work (which again, they would have no part in getting for me), audiobooks do not pay well enough to be the carrot on that particular stick. Alas, I haven’t had an agent for several years now.

I still checked the user reviews on Audible for A Little Life fairly regularly at that point, and then one day early in 2025 I was astonished to discover that the audiobook was no longer available for purchase, and the thousands of stellar user reviews were gone. I was utterly confused, until many days later I finally found the reason. For the tenth anniversary of the book’s publishing, it was being been re-recorded by actor Matt Bomer. To add salt to the already grievous wound, I read Yanagihara’s tribute for the new recording:

“It’s a dream to have Matt Bomer – an actor of great generosity, beauty, and depth – as the new voice of the A Little Life audiobook. New listeners will get to experience the book as I’d always hoped; repeat ones will, I think, find new dimensions thanks to Matt’s subtlety and skill.”

To be fair, before I started to record the book myself, I had contacted Ms. Yanagihara to ask if there was any particular direction she had for me in vocalizing her words. Her response was that she wanted it “to feel as un-rehearsed as possible. not mumblecorey, but understated." I told her that it would truly be un-rehearsed as I would not be reading the book before I began recording. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the subject matter and conveyance of the story were so powerful that as a trained actor and an egregiously empathetic soul there was absolutely no way that I could have “understated” my emotions while reading the book. Many years ago, my wonderful acting teacher Carol Fox Prescott told the class that she had been reading a book that was generally unremarkable, but that she was genuinely taken aback by one character in the book, a young girl who aspired to be an actor. When she had been asked why it was that she wanted to pursue a career as a performer, she replied, “Because I don’t like secrets.” That struck a chord in me, as I too wear my heart on my sleeve.

For the last few years it has been a struggle to stay afloat. When author Tim Dorsey passed away, my yearly income was diminished by almost ten percent, and the absence of the joy that I experienced from reading his words and channeling those characters who had become so dear to me is still painful. I am now offered far fewer books to record than ever before, most of which are Japanese “light novels” which I record under the pseudonym Cliff Kirk due to their somewhat unsavory nature. I have recorded many popular children’s books, and I would hate the idea of a young listener searching for audiobooks I have read and finding these books, the covers of which are illustrated in a cartoonish anime style. The light novels are unbelievably popular with fans of Japanese popular culture; all of my recordings are still well received, and there is no less praise for my narration, but I seem to have been forgotten by audiobook publishers and producers, many of whom I imagine have only gotten into the business after I had left the city. Out of sight, I haven’t even been in their minds to begin with.

I hope that you will excuse me for the indulgence of bearing my sorrows so publicly, but as I said, I wear my heart on my sleeve very plainly. My family have been most patient and incredibly supportive with the decline of work opportunities and thus that of my income, though some have urged me to get a regular job like working at Target or driving an Amazon delivery van, which I am loath to do. Audible does have a program called Audiobook Creation Exchange, which is a way for unpublished authors or publishers of little renown to connect with narrators, and I have done a few projects for ACX, as it is more popularly known, but the pay is lower than that of books from established publishers, and though some do offer royalties from the sales of their books, they rarely, if ever, amount to much in the long run. In addition, more often than not ACX projects require narrators to do the post production for the audiobooks, a long and painstaking process in which I am not adept and neither do I have the patience for. I now make a large part of my income attending conventions as a guest, selling autographed pictures and toys of the cartoon characters I played many years ago. I do enjoy that, as it is a way for me to at last meet my audience and receive the applause I have been missing out on for all those years.

If you are a fan of my work, I can only ask that perhaps you could leave a positive review of my performances on Audible.com, and spread the word about how much you enjoy my readings wherever you can. And if you’re a publisher or producer of audiobooks, I’m available if you need a good narrator.

It’s not just my ego that spurred the repeated appellation. My father was an Oliver as was my grandfather, so my son is Oliver IV. That’s right. Fourth in a series. Collect them all! (As a father, I am required to make jokes like that. Oliver hates it.) I go by Ollie to differentiate between my son and I, and because there is a giant international management consultant firm called Oliver Wyman. I have no idea what an international management consultant firm does. I think they’re a branch of the Illuminati.

My dad was known as Bud, however. As a little boy he was dubbed “Bunting Baby” by his nanny for some bizarre reason, which was later shortened to “Bunt”. Whenever he introduced himself to someone as Bunt they would say, “Nice to meet you, Bud.” After a while he stopped correcting them and went by Bud since then, which was appropriate. Bud Wyman enjoyed many a Budweiser.

My parents met in the ‘60s when my father was a successful marketing executive for a floor covering company. So successful that it was said he could sell carpet to a man with no floors. Ok, so maybe I was the only one who said that. My mother was a temp at the company. She was 21 and he was 43. They were married not long after meeting and I was born perhaps a year later, if that. I’ve seen pictures of the wedding and it’s not clear whether or not my mother was wearing a maternity bridal gown, but I’m pretty sure that I attended the ceremony in utero.

My father had been married once before, and from that union my sister and three brothers were spawned. My eldest brother is a bit older than my mom and his wife was pregnant with my niece at the same time that my mother was carrying me. They already had a son, my nephew, who is two years older than I am. I know it’s confusing, but don’t worry; I promise there won’t be a test.

Longtime readers of MDLYBGUTBN will recall my brother Nick, whom I have been watching perform on stage since before I can remember. Second youngest of my father’s first batch of children, Nick was preparing to go to Harvard when I was born. I can only imagine what it must have been like to have a stepmother who was just a few years his senior. My sister is around the same age as my mother and they became good friends. All but the youngest of my dad’s original brood are more avuncular than they are siblish to me. My littlest big bro is very much my brother. He turned me on to Led Zeppelin and The Ramones and weed, in that order.

My father and mother didn’t stay together for long. When I was about three years old my father left my mom and met another young woman and got married again. No children this time around, just cats. For a while the extended family would get together for the holidays, save my mother. She actually got along well with the other spouses and was fond of saying that my dad had excellent taste in wives. My father, his current wife, his first wife, and all his children would gather at his apartment for Christmas and Thanksgiving. The cats had yet to enter the picture. It was a strange family situation to be sure, and after a while I guess it became too weird and my father’s first wife bowed out of the family events. This strange family tree led to some entertaining stories though. When I was a baby my mother and I went to a restaurant with my sister and her husband and he was playing with me at the table. Charmed by the scene, some women at a nearby table said, “Oh, he’s adorable. Is he your son?”

“No, he’s my brother-in-law,” said my brother-in-law. Awkwardly, the ladies returned to their meals.

One of the most cinematic stories from my past is about the day my dad left my mom. They had been fighting and he walked out the door and down the long hallway to the elevators. My mom stood just outside the door of our apartment and said, “Why did you stay this long?” As the elevator door opened, he turned to her and said, “Noblesse Oblige.” Then he walked into the elevator and out of her life. Cold, sure, but you gotta admit the man had style.

I don’t have many memories of my dad living with us. I remember that there were soft boiled egg cups in the cupboard and floating around in my head there is an image of him sitting on the bed in front of the television putting on his socks. My earliest memory of spending time with him is after he had left, when I had chicken pox and he came to visit. I have no idea how old I was, but I do remember that he brought me an Aurora Snap-tite dinosaur model kit and I was thrilled. It was a triceratops.

For the rest of my childhood, and more than a few years of my early adulthood than I’d care to admit, I lived with my mother in the one-bedroom apartment that she still lives in. I did actually have my own room, but it was meant to be a dining room or a den, albeit a small one. It was 8 feet by 10 feet in size.

My mother is amazing. If you know anything about Dungeons and Dragons, you will understand what I mean when I say she has a Charisma of 18 (the highest one can have without bonuses from magic items or spells. Did I mention that I was NER-dee?). She is so friendly that I used to get embarrassed as a child. She’ll talk to anyone. One of her passions is volunteering at a hospital helping patients cope with whatever horrific disease or ailment they suffer from. She is beloved by the staff there and she develops genuine friendships with many of the unfortunate people she cares for. I know I’m gushing here, so I’ll also point out that she’s anal-retentive as I believe in fair and balanced journalism.

I spent Sundays with my dad and my stepmother when I was little. They lived right down the street at one point. During the summer, I would spend weekends with them at houses that they rented on the New Jersey shore. It was often weird. I remember opening the refrigerator in one of those Jersey joints only to discover that it was full of Heinekens and nothing else. The food was in the mini fridge under the counter. He had upgraded from Budweiser, apparently.

In my 20’s I worked for my dad as an office grunt on the 72nd floor of the Empire State Building. He owned a company that made non-slip rug underlay and was in fact the man who introduced non-slip rug underlay technology to this country. I think he smuggled it out of East Germany.

We were never really close, but I loved my dad. He was charming and witty, well-read and worldly. He had some great friends, and he told some great stories. Just don’t ask to hear his favorite jokes. He passed away a little over ten years ago, right as I was on the bus going down to the city to see him.

I don’t want to end this on a melancholy note, so I’ll leave you with a picture of him that always made me giggle.

The film premiered at the 2013 Rome Film Festival and was never shown again (cue sad trombone sound).

I have no idea whether or not my dialogue had made it into the final cut, but I did get credit on IMDB. Mine is the last name in the long list of credits on the Gods Behaving Badly page, and though I was uncredited in an unreleased film, I still consider it to be among the greatest achievements in my career.

Having said that, allow me to regale you with my favorite Christopher Walken story, in which I played a small part. Be warned— this tale contains ribald dialogue and may not be appropriate for delicate ears (or my mom, but she’s heard it all the same).

Years before I got the Walken gig, I met a guy (ok, he was a pot delivery guy, but that’s legal now and the statute of limitations has long since expired anyway) who told me a story about a friend of his who was an aspiring actor in Los Angeles that had been invited to an “industry” party. The party was attended by a multitude of Hollywood celebrities, and being an unknown our protagonist was kind of nervous, so he decided to go up to the roof to smoke a joint. Looking down at the balcony where many of the party guests had collected, he lit up and stargazed. There were quite a few guests on the roof as well and looking over to his right he saw Christopher Walken standing not far from him, also people-watching. Not wanting to be rude, he offered Walken the joint. Sucking half of it down (my embellishment perhaps, but I’m pretty sure that’s not off the mark), he handed back the doobie and pointed to someone on the balcony below.

“You see that? That’s Swoosie,” he said, pointing to Swoosie Kurtz. “Later on, I’m gonna have my dick in that ass.”

Apocryphal or not, you can just hear him saying that, right?

“Oh my god, that is gold. I need to tell everyone that story,” I said to my dope dealer. And so I did.

As promised, I told that story to everyone I knew (including my mom). It got to the point where every time I walked into a studio, I was met with cries of “Swoosie!” from actors and engineers. Then I told the story to my friend Jeff Woodman, a phenomenal actor and a fellow audiobook narrator.

“Oh, that is great.” he said. “Melvin and I are good friends with Swoosie. We have dinner with her about once a year. I have to tell her this story.”

At the time I was still supplementing my voice over work with computer consulting and tutoring, and one day I was leaving a client’s apartment in the Apthorp (the opulent old building on the upper West side in which many of the interior shots for Only Murders in the Building were done) when my phone rang.

It was Jeff. He and Melvin were about to have dinner with Swoosie, and he wanted to know if I would tell her the story because I do a better Walken than he does.

“Sure, I guess. But… is she cool?”

“Oh, sure. She’ll love it. And also— it’s Swoosie, not Swoozie.” It rhymes with Lucy, not floozy.

“Ok, good to know. Thanks.”

“I’ll have her call you when she gets here.”

Gulp.

Shortly after that, my phone rings again.

“Hi, this is Swoosie. I hear that you have a story to tell me?”

I go into it, a well-rehearsed bit by now, and when I get the punchline, there’s a brief pause. Then:

“WHAAT?!”

Oh good lord. What have I done.

Thinking (and praying) that she had misheard, I repeat Walken’s bawdy brag a little more loudly, painfully aware of the fact that I am in the lobby of the Apthorp with its vaulted marble ceilings, which make my voice echo all around as I watch nannies pushing past me with toddlers in strollers.

Sotto voce: “Um… he says, ‘Later on, I’m gonna have my dick in that ass.’”

Another pause.

“Oh my god. That is HYSTERICAL!!!!”

Phew.

She thanks me and hangs up. I later learn that Hal Holbrook had been in the restaurant that night and, hearing Swoosie’s outburst, he walked over to say hello and ask what the hubbub was all about. She tells him the story. It’s going viral now.

Not long after that, I was in my agent’s waiting room telling my friend Randy Pearlstein the story. Randy is arguably a better Walken impersonator than I, but I’m not going to make that argument.

“That’s really funny. I have a friend who told a similar story.”, he says.

The plot thickens.

Apparently, Randy’s friend had gone to another Hollywood party, only this time our protagonist was there with group of friends, and as they’re clustered in a corner of the place talking and laughing amongst themselves, Walken comes over out of nowhere.

“Hey, how you guys doing?” he says.

Nervous laughs and muttered replies from the group. Then:

“You know what’s great about being famous?” He points to Swoosie across the room. “You get to fuck Swoosie Kurtz in the ass.” And he walks away.

A little while after that, according to the story, Walken sweeps Swoosie off her feet and begins dancing around the room with her, and every time he gets her between himself and the gaggle of gawking guests with her back to them, he dips her and points to her ass.

“Holy shit. I’ve gotta ask my friend Jeff about this. This is the stuff of legends.”

The next time I see Jeff, I tell him the new story and ask him to ask Swoosie if she had ever done the Tango with Walken at a party. Nope. Still a great story though.

Now both stories are making the rounds, and one day I receive a letter in the mail from Jeff, which contains another envelope from Swoosie, in which there is a note from her and a picture of Walken torn from a magazine. Swoosie’s agent sent it to her and had drawn a talk bubble on the photo that said, “Swoosie!” The note read, “Give this to your friend. He did a wonderful job telling the story.”

Aw, shucks. Thanks, Swoosie.

As the aughts came to a close, Emma and I had gotten married, became parents, and found ourselves living in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan with one child and another on the way. I’d been working regularly for Audible, doing the commute from New York to Newark and back almost every day, some three hours total, and it had begun to chip away at my sanity. It was not an ideal situation.

I had known for a while that there were more than a few narrators who recorded books from their home studios. Now, I was an old hand with computer hardware, having power cycled1 hundreds if not thousands of machines over the prior two decades, so I thought this was the way I should go, and a number of producers I worked with agreed. Getting a place big enough for the family and a recording studio in Manhattan was out of the question though, so we looked in places like Hoboken, Jersey City, and even Brooklyn (Imagine living in Brooklyn). There wasn’t anything within our budget there either, and having been born and raised at toidy fit an’ toid,2 I ain’t got no time for tunnels or bridges anyway. And as noted previously, regular travel is detrimental to my mental health (which is pretty sketchy to begin with).

We finally decided to go north, to the Mid-Hudson Valley, where I had a few friends, and where we could rent a house with more than enough room for all of us and my studio at half the cost of the one-bedroom apartment we’d been living in. Our new life in the country required some large investments though— our first car together, and all the equipment plus the sound booth for my studio. Fortunately, one of my closest friends sells audio equipment for a living, so he was able to hook me up with a nice setup at a discount.

One of the first books that I narrated, recorded, and directed all by myself was Monster Hunter International, by Larry Correia. 512 pages of professional monster killers dealing with everything from vampires to shoggoths.3 It was nerd heaven. It was and continues to be one of the most popular audiobooks that I’ve ever recorded. In fact, one day I got a congratulatory email from the author letting me know that Monster Hunter International was the top-selling audiobook on Audible at that moment, and we would soon be rolling in dough. I wrote back to congratulate him and to say I was glad to hear that, but it really didn’t mean the same to me; audio publishers do not pay residuals to narrators, no matter how well the audiobooks sell. They pay us a flat fee for the recording and that’s all. Larry was truly surprised to hear that. I’m still surprised myself.

As I was settling into this new life, I got a phone call from a fellow voice-actor who had been working on a film featuring Christopher Walken, and the director had asked him if he knew of anyone who could do a convincing impression of Walken. They needed someone to dub some of his off-camera narration in the film. He called to ask if he could give them my number. Well, duh.

I have a repertoire of celebrity impressions which are pretty good if I do say so myself, and there are a handful that I can nail, Walken being the most prominent. Happy to know that my reputation as Walken’s vocal doppelganger had remained in the city after I had left, I was pumped about the idea that I might actually get a gig out of this.

My phone rang again shortly after I hung up.

“This is Ollie.”

“We heard you do a good Walken. Let’s hear it.” I could tell I was on speakerphone.

“This watch…” You know the rest.

“Can you be at Magno Studios tomorrow at 10:00?”

“Yes, indeed. See you then.”

(cue Ferris Bueller music)

OH YEAH

To be continued…

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Good writing makes my job so much easier. I have long ago stopped reading books before I record them, and well-crafted prose allows me to predict where a sentence is going, while poor writing often requires me to parse a sentence before uttering it. While I don’t read the books ahead of time, I do have a number of keywords that I search the text for before recording, such as voice, accent, dialect, gravel, rasp, and many others. I have also developed the ability to read ahead while I am speaking, so it’s usually only foreign words or the introduction of new characters that interrupt the flow of the recording.

In the late 00’s, I was hired to record a book called Adverbs by Daniel Handler, best known by his pen name: Lemony Snicket, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events. It was a collection of Handler’s short stories, and I had fun with it. The producer who hired me worked for Harper Audio (formerly Caedmon, a pioneer in spoken word recordings), and he liked my reading so much that he hired me to record a book in a series written by Tim Dorsey, a former reporter for the Tampa Bay tribune and a scholar of Floridian lore. The book was called Hurricane Punch. The protagonist of the series, Serge A. Storms, a coffee-addicted motor-mouthed Florida fanatic with multiple mental disorders, drives around the Sunshine State in a muscle car with his best friend Coleman, who is permanently inebriated and can make a bong out of anything (I can identify with both of them). They run into excruciatingly horrible people (because Florida) and Serge takes it upon himself to rid the world of such nefarious villains by murdering them in motel rooms in extraordinarily creative ways. It’s pretty dark, and outrageously funny. It was the first book I ever narrated that made me laugh out loud consistently (and cringe occasionally). The only problem I had with these books was the fact that Serge rattles off his monologues at hyper-speed due his excessive coffee drinking, some of which go on for several pages. As I am paid by the finished hour, speeding through pages diminishes the amount I receive in the end, so to counterbalance Serge’s rapid-fire rants, Coleman speaks sluggishly (as indeed he does everything else).

I was not the first narrator to record the books in this series. The first eight books were recorded by someone else, and for whatever reason they hired me for number nine. For the next seventeen years I got to record another of Dorsey’s Serge Storms books, and I looked forward to it every year. Serge and Coleman are very much a part of me. They are among the handful of characters I have voiced over the years that I felt I could truly inhabit. I could hear their voices in my head as I read, so channeling them was a breeze. Sadly, Tim Dorsey passed away in 2023, and I never got the chance to meet him and tell him how much his books meant to me. To be honest, I was afraid to contact him. There were a few listeners who were quite vocal about the fact that they did not like my characterization of Serge and I was terrified that he might have been one of them. Yet again hobbled by insecurity.

Then there was the day that I walked into the offices at Audible, where there were about a dozen manuscripts laid out on a table, including one of my favorite science fiction novels— Gateway by Fred Pohl.

“Oh my god. Who is recording this?!?” I said, hoping and praying that they hadn’t cast it yet.

“That’s for you, Ollie.”

Jackpot.

I’ve also had the pleasure of recording some notable non-fiction titles, including How Sex Works by Dr. Sharon Moalem, a fascinating look at a number of studies that reveal some remarkable peculiarities of our sexuality (for example, how pheromones work to prevent inbreeding, and the comparative length of a lesbian’s fingers); Yogi by Jon Pessah, a biography of the famous baseball player known for his malapropisms and paradoxical logic (a book I never would have read on my own, and yet made me a great admirer of Berra’s); The Dudes Abide by Alex Belth, the man who was hired to be the Coen brother’s assistant, starting with the production of one of my favorite and most oft-quoted films, The Big Lebowski (“Shut the f**k up, Donny!”); and The Plot to Betray America by Malcolm Nance, a blood-boiling recount of the horror and stupidity engendered by the incompetent, incontinent, intolerable, and perfidious piece of human filth whose name shall not be invoked here, because of course you know to whom I am referring (“Shut the f**k up, Donny!”). I had tried to keep the rage and vitriol out of my voice while recording Nance’s book but failed miserably.

At some point I became the de facto voice of Thomas Friedman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The World is Flat (for which I was awarded my second Audie, as well as an Earphone award from AudioFile Magazine and a Listen Up award from Publisher’s Weekly), and Hot, Flat, and Crowded (for which I had been honored with two Audie Awards, one for Best Non-Fiction and another for the Judge’s Award category). Friedman has also been a columnist for the New York Times for many years, focusing on foreign affairs, globalization, and technology. As it happens, we share the same birthday, which is no doubt the reason why I was selected to record his books.

Perhaps the most entertaining non-fiction books I have recorded were the autobiographies of comedians who were unable to record the books themselves for one reason or another, such as Todd Glass (dyslexic), Artie Lange (drug-addled), and Ralphie May (sadly, gone the way of all flesh). I considered landing those jobs a tribute to my comedic timing and delivery. Either that or because I have the air of a dyslexic drug-addled dead guy.

As I said, there were some titles that weren’t such a joy to record, but I’ll keep those to myself to protect the innocent (and the inept).

I had an ESL job with Paul Ruben, the man without whom I would not be where I am today, quite literally. It was a short session— a solo recording of me doing monologues. I was in a weird mood that day, and I poured myself into the control room, clinging to and sliding around the door frame with a goofy smile on my face, declaring, “I’m feeling rather silly today…”

Generally, when we record ESL programs, the publisher will send one or more editors to ensure that the recordings go as planned. Oxford and Cambridge University Press were frequent clients, so many of the editors were Brits who were either expats or just visiting from Old Blighty. There were two editors from Oxford that day, neither of whom I had worked with before. A nice young American named Kate, and a lovely English woman named Emma who had the most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen and a smile that stopped me dead in my tracks. Immediately, I put the kibosh on the silliness and traded the goofy smile for a beatific one.

Paul introduced us and I got in the booth. I remember thinking, “Ollie and Emma… Emma and Ollie… I like the sound of that.”

The book we were recording was called Totally True, and the first thing I read was a piece in which there were was an unusual Russian name, and I breezed through it in one take, nailing the Russian right off the bat (My best friend grew up in Saint Petersburg, so I am familiar with the language). Emma had been prepared to give me the proper pronunciation of the name, and she smiled and said “Well, I guess we don’t need it then.” I could tell that she was impressed. I did a little fist-pump in my head.

During a break I sidled over to the studio’s lounge where Emma was looking out the window, her hands in her back pockets. The vista was a striking view of Hell’s Kitchen and the Hudson River, with the infamous Rudy’s Bar and Grill across the street below. It was the middle of March and it had begun to snow. I stood and watched the snow fall alongside her. Inspired, I immediately came up with the most clever and charming pick-up line in the history of shameless lechery.

“So, you like beer?”

Arrogant and ineloquent. What’s not to like?

That Friday, we met at Heartland Brewery across from Union Square Park, a favorite haunt of mine which is no longer there, sadly. We had a lovely dinner together, with several beers, but there were moments that might have portended disaster.

“So having grown up in the UK you must be a fan of Monty Python, right?”

“Not really, actually. Too anarchic.”

Oh dear. Was this a red flag? Like most nerds, I considered the Pythons to be sacrosanct. Then I put my foot squarely into my mouth. Hard.

"I guess if we end up together, I’ll be doing all the cooking. Heh, heh.”

“What?”

“Well, you know… your country is well-known for having the worst cuisine in the world… heh. You know the joke about how all the chefs in Hell are British, right?”

Apparently not.

Emma was aware that England had such a reputation, but I don’t think she found it funny, so the joke went over like the proverbial lead balloon with anvils and bowling balls for ballast. I was reticent to point out that hers is a country which serves things like kidney stew and the unspeakable horror that is black pudding (essentially a giant scab). Clearly this called for more beer.

The beer helped. Remarkably, it prevented further idiocy on my part, and it may also have had the added bonus of making me appear more attractive as the evening went on. Needless to say, I could use all the help I could get at that point.

We went to a bar after that, and there was definitely some chemistry there (despite my bungling), but I felt a little out of place. I’ve frequented many a tavern in the East Village before, but in my (very) late thirties, I was almost certainly the oldest patron in the establishment by a long shot. We were sitting at the bar and Emma put her hand on my leg. Moments later, unconcerned about the youths surrounding us, we started snogging (hooray for beer!). For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term snogging, it’s British for “making out”, and I’m pretty sure that it qualifies as good chemistry. If that part of the story is included in this piece, it will only have been because I had gotten permission from Emma to do so (and apparently, I did. Yay!).

For our second date, Emma and I went to see Downfall at the Film Forum (it was Emma’s idea). Downfall is a German film about Hitler’s last days. Not exactly a rom com, despite the hilarious ending where Hitler and Eva Braun take cyanide and shoot themselves while on fire in a ditch. Alas, there was no snogging in the theater that night.

Emma and I quickly became a pair, and while I was on my best behavior when I was with her, there were plenty of people in the world of ESL who were familiar with my eccentricities and appalling lack of restraint. A short while after we started seeing each other, Emma went out for drinks after work with a colleague who is a fellow Brit.

“Do you have a significant other?” she had asked Emma.

“Yes, actually. I’ve been dating an actor that I met at a recording session.”

“Oh? What’s their name? I’ve been to the studio many times and I know most of the actors who record the audio programs for us.”

“His name is Ollie.”

“What, mad Ollie?!?”

She can’t say she wasn’t warned.

Wide-eyed looks from the trio of semi-suits. I do my best imitation of my brother and they howl with laughter. Goes over a lot better than the Christopher Walken bit.

My brother Nick is the reason I do what I do. He is unbelievably talented; he is one of the most accomplished and well-known actors on Broadway; he has been in scores of films and television shows— unless you’re Amish, it’s pretty likely that you’ve seen him before (but then if you were Amish, it’s pretty unlikely that you would be reading this). He was also the president of Actor’s Equity for a while, so he’s kind of a big deal. As a significantly smaller deal, I have no issues with nepotism.

When I was eight years old, Nick was dating a dancer who was the choreographer for a children’s theater company called ABC, or “Acting By Children”, and I wanted in. There was no audition. Your parents ponied up the cash and you were part of the company, learning stagecraft on the go as you rehearsed every Saturday to perform in an original children’s musical after about eight weeks. The first play I was in was called Country Heir, which starred a dashing, handsome fifteen-year-old named Jason Alexander. Yeah. That Jason Alexander.

There were a few other members of ABC who went on to fame and fortune: Corey Glover, actor and lead singer of Living Color; David Herman, whom you know from Office Space, MAD TV, and dozens of other films and TV shows; and Alex Winter, whom everyone (even the Amish) would recognize as Bill S. Preston of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

After working with ABC for a few years, I got a manager and an agent and did a few TV and radio commercials, but I grew out of that (and grew my hair out) as a teen. I did some stage productions in high school and college, but I didn’t really get serious about acting again until I was in my twenties. It was then that I started working with a wonderful teacher named Carol Fox Prescott, perhaps the wisest and most endearing person I have ever known. Her ability to elicit emotional honesty and openness from an actor is simply astonishing. Some of the greatest performances I have ever seen in my life were in her apartment during her class, from people who couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper bag with a chainsaw. Or so I had thought.

One of my fellow disciples started producing an improvised serial-play in a charmingly decrepit night club in the East Village and I was a part of it for quite a while (that’s a whole ‘nother story there). An actor in the show had an audition for a voice-over job one day and asked if I wanted to come along. It was an audition for an ESL program.

Isn’t this where we came in?

Now back to the agents.

After a few years, I felt that I was a small fish in a big pond at the agency I was with, and (despite the warning that I had been given by a fellow actor) I started to work with a smaller agency and a person who will go unnamed, as I have learned long ago not to invoke even minor demons without a pentagram and a protective circle. One day I discovered that I had been nominated for no less than four Audie awards, and with a cocky swagger I went to my agent’s office, beaming with joy.

“I just found out I got four Audie nominations!”

“That’s nice. Doesn’t mean anything you know.”

After I finished throwing up in their wastebasket from the savage blow to the gut, I walked out of their office, shaking my head. Apparently, I hadn’t arrived. From the feeling I had gotten from my agent, I hadn’t even gotten on the train yet. Perhaps I should have heeded that warning.

Now the vast majority of talent agents are not cold-blooded reptiles, but perhaps a few of them are sociopathic remoras. I can wait if you need to look that up.

One day a producer who works for a major publisher contacts me. They want me to record Christopher Moore’s first three novels and they’re paying a very tidy sum for the job. Much tidier than it had ever been before. I told them to contact my agent. It was a good day. Maybe I finally had arrived!

A few days later I get a call from an executive at the publishing house.

“We’re just so excited that you’re going to be recording these books.”, she says.

“Thank you so much. I’m looking forward to it. I really enjoy Moore’s work, and I’m so pleased that you thought of me.”

“Oh, by all means. I love your work. And I love your show.”

“… my show?”

“You know, your show on Sunday night.”

“I… I don’t have a show on Sunday night…”

“Oh, whatever. We’re looking forward to working with you.”

“Thanks. Me too.” I hung up. A few minutes later, the phone rings again.

“Oh. I am so so sorry. I thought you were Oliver Platt!”

Nope. Still on the train.

The punch line? My agent had already signed the contract. I recorded all three books and got that tidy sum as well as an Earphone award from Audiofile Magazine for Christopher Moore’s debut novel, Practical Demonkeeping.

Sorry about that, Mr. Platt.

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As I pointed out in the last installment, I am a nerd. But not just a comic book nerd. I’m also a science fiction nerd, an epic fantasy nerd, a Dungeons & Dragons nerd, a cartoon nerd, a computer nerd, and a video game nerd. When it comes to nerding, I don’t hold back. In early ‘90s, before I started working as a voice actor, I wrote video game review columns for a heavy metal rag called LiveWire, as well as the legendary CREEM magazine, which is kind of a cooler, edgier version of Rolling Stone (and what’s cooler and edgier than video games?). In any case, I played a lot of games, and for years I usually had a Gameboy on me to pass the time when needed, like while waiting around in an ESL session. These sessions would often go from 10AM to 5PM, and everyone took turns at the mic, usually two or more of us at a time. The rest of us sat around in a huge studio being very quiet while waiting for our turn. One day I had an ESL gig with the usual cast of characters— there were about 12 of us who had become sort of a family after years of spending all day in the recording studio together, much like the way soldiers develop a bond in combat. But there was a new member of the group that day. She was a perfect fit for our assembly of articulators, and at the end of the session I said, “You’re really good. You must do other voice over work.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I’m Ash on Pokémon.” It was Veronica Taylor. The original voice of Ash Ketchum, the protagonist of the Pokémon TV series. You may have heard of it.

At this point I pulled the Gameboy out of my back pocket and showed it to her. I had been playing Pokémon (which is a game that is pretty much a cross between birdwatching and Rock Paper Scissors, and the show is essentially a half hour long advertisement for it, with the imperative, “Gotta catch ‘em all!”). Trying and failing to keep my eyes from goggling out of my head, I asked in the most pitiful, pleading voice I could muster, “I want very much to be a Pokémon… please can I be a Pokémon?” She was kind enough to introduce me to the folks at the company who produced Pokémon and a slew of other animated TV shows. They hired me right away. I was thrilled. Doing voices for cartoons had been a dream job all my life. The Bugs Bunny and Popeye impressions I had been doing to entertain myself and others for so many years had finally paid off.

I did that for a few years, as well as doing audiobooks and ESL, but I always had the feeling that the animation folks thought, “Oh, Ollie’s good at cartoons, but you should hear his audiobooks!” and the audiobook people felt that, “Ollie’s a great narrator, but what he’s really amazing at is doing cartoon character voices.” As it happens, I was once hired to record a book called Planet Simpson, all about the history of The Simpsons, and all of the characters were quoted many times throughout the book. They couldn’t get the rights to take clips from all the shows, and they certainly couldn’t afford to bring all the cast members into the studio to record their lines, so it fell to me to do an impression of every character on The Simpsons. Woof.

Now, I will say that my Chief Wiggum is pretty much spot on, and I can do a passable Moe, Mr. Burns, Smithers, and maybe Milhouse, but most of the other characters on The Simpsons are a stretch for me, and I’m certain that my efforts were not well received. Audiobook narrators are generally actors first and foremost, and it’s difficult to be a performer without an audience. I have always maintained that actors are psychic vampires. We feed on applause and adulation, and sitting in a box talking to a microphone doesn’t allow one to feed. User reviews on Audible.com are about all we get in the form of audience feedback. I still look at the reviews for many of the titles I’ve recorded on Audible.com pretty regularly, but I have never looked at the reviews for Planet Simpson.

A few years after Planet Simpson, I was hired to do my first science fiction novel, a monstrous tome, and the running time for the recording was just a few minutes shy of 30 hours when finished. Before I began the sessions, I was told by the producer that the pay would not be the same as it was for all the other books I had recorded so far. It would be about 65% less. This soon became the new rate for audiobook recordings across the board. The golden goose had become a stainless-steel swan.

Soon after that I started working for Audible. A producer there had contacted me, and he was very excited about working with me. Apparently, I had garnered a reputation. I went to Newark to record a few books in their sprawling offices which were uniquely constructed. Meeting rooms were walled entirely in glass, so everyone can see what’s going on in them, but not hear what’s being discussed. One day when I was recording there, I saw my friend Marc Thompson (one of the most extraordinarily talented and accomplished voice actors in the business, and a fellow nerd) talking casually to someone in one of those glass boxes, and being the impulsive busybody that I am, I barged in to say hello to Marc. He introduced me to the woman he was speaking with, an acquisitions editor, and upon hearing my name, she said, “You’re Oliver Wyman? Oh, you’re one of our seller narrators.”

Seller narrator? You mean, people buy books because I’m the narrator? Jinkies. It was difficult to leave the room at that point as my head had swollen beyond the width of the doorway. I kept thinking that they probably shouldn’t have told me that, but I felt as if I had truly arrived.

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In the late ‘90s, one of the producers that hired me for ESL jobs began working with audiobooks. He asked me to record some short stories for a small publisher in Canada or some other tiny, distant country. I was delighted to get the opportunity to do some “long form” voice-over work, which was far more lucrative than ESL jobs at the time. Then, in 2000, that producer asked me if I would like to record It’s Not About the Bike, Lance Armstrong’s autobiography, which was to be my first full-length audiobook. I was a bit nervous about the job, so I pored over the manuscript for days before the recording. It entailed several days in the studio, where I was treated like a minor celebrity (they bought me lunch!).

After I finished the recording, I went back to slaving over a hot microphone in the world of ESL, happy to have done the audiobook, and even happier when I got the check, but I attributed it to dumb luck that I had been given the job in the first place—Armstrong was supposed to have done it himself but had to cancel at the last minute. Then one day the producer asked me into his office. “You’ve been nominated for an Audie award.”, he said. The Audies are the audiobook equivalent of the Oscars. Needless to say, I was flabbergasted. Gob smacked even.

The audiobook was nominated in the category of “Spiritual and Inspirational” for the 2001 Audie awards, up against Deepak Chopra’s How to Know God, among other titles. Clearly, I didn’t stand a chance against the man who was champion of all things spiritual and inspirational. I think the ceremony was in Chicago or some other wretched metropolis that wasn’t New York City. Surely, I had no chance of winning, so I wasn’t going. Not long after the ceremony, I got a call from the producer. I won. I got an award for my first audiobook. Once again flabbergasted and gob smacked, I realized then that this was my calling, and I was more than happy to pay $250 for the lovely hunk of lucite with my name on it.

It wasn’t long before I recorded my second audiobook, Pekka Himanen’s The Hacker Ethic, a book which included a lot of arcane computer terminology. I had been supplementing my voice-over career with work as a private computer consultant for a long time, basically unplugging people’s wi-fi and plugging it back in so it would work again. Because of this, I was the only narrator available who was familiar with the complex world of unplugging and re-plugging computer equipment, so I was perfect for the job.

Some time after that, I got to record the somewhat notorious not-a-memoir A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. You may recall that Oprah lauded this book and recommended it to everyone, and then made a big stink about it when it was discovered that it was not the true story that the author claimed it to be. It was a brutal tale about a young man who had completely destroyed his life and his teeth as a result of doing every conceivable drug or drink or household cleaning product he could get his hands on. It was my first opportunity to do some actual acting in an audiobook, and I went all out. I remember getting really emotional at the end, which is not unusual. When my children were little, they would never go to the movies with me because they were too embarrassed. I cry when watching any Pixar or Marvel movie. I cried watching Robocop 2.

I should note here that two of the non-fiction books I had initially recorded turned out to be fabricated to some degree; Frey’s book was all made up, and then it was discovered that though he swore up and down and all around town that he wasn’t, Lance Armstrong was in fact doping the whole time that he won all those Tour de France races after recovering from cancer. As a result of that, It’s Not About the Bike is out of print and no longer available as an audiobook. I was very disappointed that I didn’t get to record Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

Not long after the A Million Little Pieces audiobook was released, I got my first piece of fan-mail, and it was a doozy. The publisher forwarded an email to the producer, who forwarded it to me. It was a long and wonderful letter from a woman who was praising my work, saying how she and her husband thoroughly enjoyed it and that they felt that the audiobook sounded as if they were listening to a play with different actors playing the parts. Smiling like an idiot as I read it, I scrolled down to the bottom and saw their names. Adrian and Gene Colan.

Wait. Gene Colan? Like the guy who drew all the classic Marvel comics that I grew up with Gene Colan? The guy who drew Iron Man, and Dracula, and Howard the monkeylovin’ Duck Gene Colan? Sure enough, there was a link to genecolan.com at the very bottom. I clicked it, and my screen was suddenly filled with a gloriously colorful collage of all the characters he’d drawn, as Thus Spake Zarathustra blared from my speakers. With my mouth hanging open, I looked up at the equally agape and shocked face of the Howard the Duck figure sitting on top of my monitor. It was like something out of a movie. I got fan mail from Gene Colan. As a life-long comic book nerd, I was over the moon.

I was invited to the Audie awards ceremony the next year, though I hadn’t been nominated for anything. I was there to schmooze. I was at a table with that producer, now my friend, Paul Ruben, a man to whom I will always owe an infinite debt of gratitude for giving me my start and for giving me so much work and is not Pee Wee Herman, as well as some people from the audio publishing company that published It’s Not About the Bike and A Million Little Pieces. They seemed a little uncomfortable for some reason, and Paul leaned over and explained that A Million Little Pieces had been submitted for an Audie nomination, but it didn’t make the cut because they had submitted it under the wrong category. I can’t remember what category it was that they had submitted it for. I think maybe Children’s Literature. Regardless, even if it is for the wrong category, it’s an honor to be submitted to be nominated.

Bizarrely, I recently discovered that A Million Little Pieces has since been re-recorded by someone else. As it turns out, that wouldn’t be the last time that would happen to me.

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