The End As I Know It

by Kevin Shay

  “So what are you gonna do?” Damien says.

  My heart sinks. Damn it, Damien.

  “I’m still thinking it over,” I say.

  “Dude, I gotta take a leak.” Damien gets up. Mission un-accomplished. Another X on the list. I drain my glass and take a slice of cold pizza.

  chapter 2

  449

  Days

  Damien lives with this? I was looking forward to a shower this morning, having skipped yesterday, but I should have guessed the tub would be as nasty as the rest of the loft. All I can find for soap is a mushy sliver, with the inevitable few strands of hair attached, shoved into a rusty corner. The drain can tolerate about thirty seconds of water, or a minute at half pressure, before it backs up, from which point on you wallow up to your ankles in slimy mire. To get the bathwater soup off my feet I have to stand storkwise outside the shower, on a mildewy mat, and extend one foot at a time into the tub for rinsing. Once I’m dried and dressed, I feel dirtier than before I went in.

  In the kitchen I find one of the flatmates in his bathrobe, making coffee.

  “Morning. Ron, right?”

  “Yeah. Randall, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Morning. You want some coffee?”

  “Oh, no, thanks, I should run.” I do want coffee, but not from that fiasco of a kitchen. I tiptoe up to Damien’s room, where he snores peacefully on. I grab my gear, leave him a note saying I’ll be back in midafternoon, and flee the loft for the fresher air of the South Side of Chicago. Singing sotto voce on my way to the car: “If you go down there, you better just beware, of Marxists who won’t call a plumber.”

  The school is a half-hour drive away in a nice neighborhood, affluent but earthy. The kind of place I used to think I’d like to settle down, back when the world had a future and you could ponder such things. A quick stop for coffee and toast at a place nearby, then I sit in the car and warm up my voice with some cursory scales. This isn’t grand opera, and kids don’t much care if you’re on pitch, but the semblance of a preperformance ritual relaxes me.

  Inside the school, a familiar milieu. Zero security. Bustling open-plan classrooms, colorful student artwork and construction-paper signs hanging everywhere. Children who have never heard of a hall pass wander blithely between activities, noting my presence without suspicion. A close cousin to the school in Cambridge I worked at for the past few years. Where I looked forward to showing up every day, and where the students looked forward to my block of their daily schedule. A leisurely microcosm where the biggest crisis is the third grade’s missing garter snake, and if we don’t find him, hey, let’s write a song about him. Where I got to know the kids over the course of months, instead of providing a morning’s worth of laughs and ducking out. And why did I leave, again? Well, because I knew the kids too well. And had a premonition: the more attached I became, the more desperately I’d need to clue their families in to the impending calamity. The autumn’s first potluck supper would have found me hectoring a group of parents about long-term food storage, to no effect except a probable pink slip. Oh, I guess I should have tried anyway. I did put out feelers to some teachers over the summer. Their bemusement showed me that even if the school were ever to mount a community preparation effort, Wacky Singing Puppet Guy would be the wrong figurehead for it.

  So I gave the Ogden Lane School my notice in August, forcing them to scramble to find a replacement, and now here I am making my way among anonymous children to the offices of an anonymous school, introducing myself to a tiny, chipper secretary named Anne. “With an e,” she tells me, as if I’ll have occasion to write it. “I’m the admin assistant here,” she explains, unprompted, “but I just started taking classes for an education degree.”

  “That’s great!”

  After we fill out my waivers and tax forms, Anne leads me to the Small Auditorium, where the lower-school assembly will take place. Is there a larger auditorium somewhere, or was this one endowed by a Mr. Small? I don’t ask. It does turn out to be little, with only a couple of rows of seats in a semicircle around the edge of the room.

  “Most of the kids sit on the floor,” Anne says. “Is this OK? You’ll go there.” She points to a six-inch platform in the front of the room, the only place I could possibly be intended to go. “Is this OK?” she asks again, worried.

  “It’s perfect.” I set my backpack down on the stage. “I’ll just go get the rest of my stuff.”

  “Oh, Harold will help you.” I turn around and flinch, startled by a large man looming at Anne’s side, as if conjured by the mention of his name.

  “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you!” Harold claps me jovially on the shoulder. “I’m Harold.” He is at least two hundred and eighty pounds of Harold, packed into a flannel shirt and Dickies. The maintenance guy. Which at a small school encompasses lots of other crap, like helping to carry puppets. He’s maybe fifty, with slicked-back dyed black hair and something a tad awry in his affect. He stands too close, meets my eye with inappropriate intensity. The kids must have no end of urban legends about this dude. Is it true about the bodies in the boiler room, Harold? You can level with me.

  He leads the way out of the building and down the street, which proves awkward because he doesn’t know where my car is and walks right by it. “It’s this one,” I call after him. “Harold! Back here.” He turns around with a disconcerting grin.

  Then he surprises me. “I looked at your web site,” he says. Surprising not only because of the incongruity between Harold and the information superhighway, but also because I tend to forget I even have a web site. It has a few photos, booking info, some low-fi audio samples, and blurbs from assorted educators, but nothing too personal and nothing I update regularly. Also, the thing is ugly as hell. Some friend of Gene Denley’s has a son in junior high who’s “really good with the Internet,” and not long ago Gene convinced me to pay the kid a nominal fee to wreak aesthetic havoc on my online presence. White text on a forest-green background, an animated image of a pixelated puppet (not one of mine but a generic clip-art harlequin) opening and closing his mouth.

  “I didn’t do the design,” I feel compelled to say.

  “You know much about this Y2K?”

  Whoa. Where did he get that? Do I give off a scent or something? Oh, right. In July I added a small “Y2K: The Year 2000 Computer Bug” section to the Links page of my site, without comment, below the folk-song databases and puppetry hubs, in a halfhearted attempt at consciousness-raising that I thought nobody would ever notice. But Harold has proven me wrong.

  “Yeah, I’ve been looking into it,” I say, suddenly nervous. Y2K still feels like some shameful secret you bring up in hushed tones with loved ones, not the kind of thing an acquaintance of ten minutes ought to mention.

  “You think the grid’s gonna go down?” He gives me that too-intense stare again, and it strikes me that Harold isn’t merely curious about the topic. I’ve stumbled upon someone else who Gets It. My first offline encounter with a fellow GI, I realize with a small thrill.

  “No doubt about it,” I say.

  “Me too. Did you see where one third of power companies are still in the assessment phase?”

  “Yep. Ridiculous.” So it works the same way in real life as online. Once we’ve identified each other, the catastrophe is a priori and we can skip right to details, speaking in the shorthand of the clued-in. I unlock my car.

  “Buddy of mine and me have a place in the Dells.”

  Where are the Dells? “The Dells, that’s great.” I nod as if I’ve been there often.

  “Hey, how are you set for gold?”

  “I think I’m covered.” The truth is, my money’s still in the bank. I’ll see the warning signs early enough to get it out in cash, and although some of the goldbugs on the net would scoff at me, I believe U.S. currency will hold up for a while. But I don’t say so to Harold, who may be touchy on the subject. People who are into gold are really into gold. I hand him a satchel of puppets.

/>   “Well, I got a guy in Evanston. He’ll give you a square deal, you ever need gold.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I just feel bad for these kids, you know?”

  “Oh, I know. Terrible. Terrible.”

  “Poor kids.”

  I open, as usual, with “The Ship Titanic.” It goes over well these days, even with kids too young to have seen the movie, because the movie’s mere existence lends the song a certain cachet. Some of my fellow children’s performers try to make themselves relevant by delivering cringe-making covers of current Top 40 hits. Huge mistake. Whenever I’m tempted to work up an MTV pastiche of some kind, the thought of Leona Flegman stops me in my tracks. Leona’s pushing middle age and as white as they come, with a nylon-string guitar and sub–Joni Mitchell voice, and Leona, tragically, raps. Her bloodcurdling “hip-hop” fairy tales now make up half her set, and she can’t understand why schools don’t ask her back, or why the kids laugh at the wrong times during her act. The specter of Leona keeps me rooted in the past. I embrace the fundamental squareness of the song-and-story format, wear a goofy red corduroy jacket, choose a few songs on subjects the kids know about from other media, and let the stories and jokes win them over.

  Not that these kids need much winning over. Audiences at certain schools are predisposed to scorn the guitar-toting loser they’ve been forced to sit and listen to. Mostly you get that at public schools, and with students a little older than these, although I’ve seen my share of cooler-than-thou third-graders. Those need special handling, an extra helping of irony and self-deprecation. But these kids, as I suspected from my brief tour of the school, are not only young but have had the hootenanny mentality drilled deeply enough into them that they’re with me from the first chord. The second time through the chorus, the requisite substitution of “Uncles and aunts, Little children lost their pants” gets them giggling and leavens the song’s darkness a little. It also cuts down on the complaints from teachers who would have preferred no songs about death. Folk songs are all about death. You don’t want death, book a juggler.

  Next I reach into a bag, pull out a cute felt-and-vinyl raccoon puppet, and put him on my hand. “I’d like to introduce a friend of mine,” I say. The raccoon looks around warily, intimidated by the crowd of strangers.

  “His name is Rodney K. Raccoon. People call him R. K. Raccoon for short. He has the same initials as me, because what’s my name?”

  “Randall Knight!” shout the scattered few who paid attention when I was introduced, a few of them hesitating over the silent K.

  “Ralph Kleppenhausen!” R. K. Raccoon yells in his eager, squeaky voice.

  The children erupt into laughter and protestations. No! Randall Knight!

  “Roger Kowalski?” says R. K. Raccoon.

  Et cetera. Every time I do this bit, an extra name tries to insert itself: Rusty Kuntz, one of pro baseball’s more unfortunately named players. Poor Rusty was a journeyman outfielder who stayed in the majors long enough to make a whole generation of preadolescent baseball-card collectors snicker. I live in perpetual fear of shouting out his name to a roomful of kindergarteners.

  “R. K., you have a story you’d like to share today, don’t you?” I ask him.

  “Oh…no…they wouldn’t want to hear my story.”

  “Well, don’t sell yourself short, R. K. I think these guys would enjoy your story. Would you like to hear the story?” A chorus of affirmatives.

  “But it’s not a very important story,” R. K. says sadly. Demurral is half the raccoon’s shtick. Whether or not they want to hear the story now, they damn well will by the time they convince the little fellow of his self-worth.

  After much coaxing, R. K. Raccoon tells the story of Johnny Coffeebean. Johnny is a young lad whose mother sends him off to market one day to sell the family Volvo, admonishing him to get the fair Blue Book value for it. On his way there, a series of fast-talking used-car salesmen dupe hapless Johnny into trading down to a Hyundai, then a bicycle, and finally a bag of magic coffee beans. His mother, furious, kicks him out. So he wanders the countryside, sowing coffee beans, and wherever he plants a bean, a Starbucks franchise grows. (He’s quite the social critic, my raccoon.) The kids don’t get half the references, but they love the motormouthed salesmen and the dumb-as-nails protagonist.

  A couple more songs, and then another puppet comes out. Salmon Ella. I’m not the first to make this pun and I won’t be the last. Ella is a large cotton-stuffed fish in a Coast Guard uniform. She wants everything to be “shipshape” and is deeply scandalized whenever it isn’t. A nautical Martha Stewart, basically. She takes the children to task for being out of uniform (I skip that part in schools with actual uniforms) and faints repeatedly at what a mess I’ve made of the stage. I pick out an amiable-looking teacher and have Ella nag him about his fashion sense for a few minutes. Then she gets down to her tutorial. “Today we’re going to make a delightful bagel cozy out of some wonderfully delicate Italian burlap,” she enthuses. “You should be able to do this quite easily at home. All you’ll need is an iron, a pair of pinking shears, a nonreactive skillet, a bench press, a mink stole, half a pound of Flintstones vitamins—are you writing this down?”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I interrupt her. “Hold on a second, Ella. This actually sounds like it might be kind of hard.”

  Salmon Ella regards me balefully. “No, no. It’s quite simple once you get the hang of spot-welding.”

  “Spot-welding? Ella, this is really too complicated. Why would anyone need a bagel cover in the first place?”

  “No, no, nooo. A co-zy. Well, I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Not with horrid posture like that!” She spends some time correcting my posture, leading to amusing complications because I’m wearing her on my hand. “Stand with your arms straight down by your sides,” she instructs me, and I comply, which puts her upside down and backwards. And so forth.

  The kids eat it up. But why doesn’t their mood rub off on me? Some malignant nodule of Y2K awareness in my brain takes all the laughter and adoration and converts it to melancholy, foreboding, even anger at the oblivion of the adults in the room. I am a carrier of enjoyment, incapable of coming down with it myself.

  A few more songs and puppet antics, another appearance by R. K., and then my act climaxes with “The Grasshopper and the Ant.” Which lately I can’t help thinking of as a millennial parable. I’ve thought of spelling out this connection—the ant would store up food for “the big New Year’s Eve storm” or whatever. But what are the kids supposed to do, go home and convince their parents to start downloading compliance reports? Besides, it would muddle my elaborate treatment of the story.

  The intro is key. “Now, I have one more story for you today,” I say. “It’s called ‘The Grasshopper and the Ant.’ Some of you may have heard it before. But I’m gonna tell it using some really special puppets.” I’ve toiled for months, I explain, to make these amazingly realistic puppets, and I’m very proud of them. But this is also the first time I’ve tried them out, so I might need a little help. “If you can’t hear the story, or if anything else doesn’t seem right, don’t be afraid to speak up.” A few more rhetorical flourishes about how lifelike these puppets are, and then I reach into my bag and yank them out.

  Two wooden dowels, each with a life-sized novelty-shop rubber bug glued to one end. The grasshopper is an inch long, the ant a black dot that doesn’t even cover his dowel’s tip. “They’re too small,” cries one officious girl over the general amusement, but I pretend not to hear, play it utterly straight. “Once upon a time there was a grasshopper and an ant. The grasshopper was a merry fellow who loved to dance and sing the day away. All day long he’d sing his song.” For the song my voice drops to a tiny whine as I wave the stick a few feeble inches from side to side.

  The children pounce. “We can’t hear! Louder!”

  My face droops in disappointment. “Is something wrong? I thought it was going really well!”

  “Too quiet! Loude
r!” they demand.

  “Oh. All right. I’ll try to be a little louder. Anyway, the wintertime was coming, and while the grasshopper sang and danced, the ant was busy gathering up food for the long winter months. Every day he’d go over to the grasshopper’s house and he’d say—” I move my lips soundlessly, brandishing the ant.

  The house explodes. “Louder!”

  I milk it for one more cycle, then relent. “Oh boy. I was afraid this might happen. I guess these puppets need a little more work, huh? But you know what? I think I still have the old ones somewhere. Let’s see.”

  I rummage in the bag and pull out a more reasonable grasshopper, about six inches long, and restart the story. “All day long he’d sing his song.” The replacement grasshopper sings his song, not loud but audibly. “Is that better?” Yes!

  “Great! Now if only I could find the ant. Oh, here he is.”

  From the bag I haul a gargantuan ant, bigger than all the other puppets put together, almost the size of Anne the administrative assistant. “YOU SHOULD BE GATHERING FOOD FOR WINTER!” it bellows at the grasshopper in my best Darth Vader.

  Pandemonium! The kids are beside themselves. The rest is gravy. I coast through the tale itself, which needs no embellishment beyond the big loud ant, encore with “Goodnight, Irene,” and it’s on to questions and answers.

  Hey, it beats working.

  As the kids file out and I put my gear away, I look up to see a two-foot-tall boy with his finger in his mouth looking at me shyly. “Well, hi there,” I say.