The End As I Know It

by Kevin Shay

  She introduces herself, Christina something. “I saw your site on the web?” she says.

  My little batch of Y2K links rearing its head again? Have to get Gene to take that off of there. “Did you! I’m afraid I haven’t updated it in a while.”

  “Well, you know, I saw you have one puppet that’s a raccoon?”

  “Yep, mm-hm. R. K. Raccoon.”

  “Oh, gosh.” She stares at the floor. “I’m sorry to ask you this. But one of my kids, Michael? He’s, um, got kind of a phobia?”

  Oh, saints preserve us. “Of raccoons?”

  “Yeah, and squirrels? He’s just a jittery kid, poor guy. And there was, you know, an incident? Where is he, he’s…” She looks out into the sea of hyperactivity, trying to point Michael out to me.

  “OK, well, I don’t have any squirrels, so no problem there. And the raccoon, I mean, it’s not a very realistic likeness.”

  “I don’t want to ask you to change your act,” Christina says, although that’s exactly what she wants to do. I’m mentally juggling the set already. If I can’t use R. K., then I should move the salmon earlier, and maybe trot out the seldom-seen Jersey Joe Giraffe (renamed from Geronimo Giraffe thanks to a prickly part–Native American parent at Ogden) for the story of Giraffic Park. “But maybe you could, you know, give me a sign when you get to that part? And I could take Michael out of the room?”

  Maybe you could take me out of the room while you’re at it, and shoot me. “No, no, I don’t need to do the raccoon,” I tell her.

  She brightens with relief. “Really? Oh, that’d be great.”

  “He’s pretty scared, huh?”

  “Yeah, like I said, there was an incident? I think when his family was on vacation? Well, anyway, thanks.” She rushes back into the fray to quell a minor uprising. Now I’m alone onstage, not sure what to do. I don’t see Jim anywhere. The kids are as seated as they’re going to get. What cue am I waiting for—should I start? Hello? Grown-ups? A little help?

  Just when I’m ready to hop off the stage and go find Jim, here he comes, striding through the door and down the aisle, followed by a slightly shaky Mrs. Pease. A wave of relative quiet follows her. Impressive. She must have done some epic yelling in her day to command such respect. She mounts the stage and gives me a tight smile and quick nod: All is well. I’m not convinced.

  She adjusts the height of the mike and clears her throat to address the student body. Playing with fire, if you ask me. I hope she’s back in control of her GI tract, because if she lets loose again in front of all the kids, we’ve got Attica on our hands. Also, bile does terrible things to felt. I cast a wary eye toward my bag of puppets.

  “Good morning, everyone,” she says.

  “Rhubarb rhubarb something Pease,” two hundred little voices reply.

  “We’re gonna have a pretty special assembly today. This is my friend Randall. Can we say hello to Randall?” She’s good at this, strikes just the right tone, exudes a comforting solidity. The brusque f-word-spouting cynic I met in her office is nowhere in evidence, replaced by a sturdy matron who’s friendly but indisputably in charge, and when she calls me her friend it makes me want to believe it.

  “Hamana hamana Randall,” the children say.

  “Hi, everyone!” I say.

  “Randall is gonna sing some songs for us and introduce us to some of his friends. We’ll meet a turtle named Tina and a fish named Ella.” Apparently she read my flyer more carefully than the directions on the nicotine gum. All other things being equal, I’d prefer she didn’t telegraph my material, but whatever she has to do to placate the crowd is fine by me.

  “And if he’s willing to talk to us today, we’ll meet a shy little guy named R. K. Raccoon.” Oops. They neglected to inform the principal about the rodent embargo. From a row toward the back of the hall, a commotion rises above the baseline commotion, which has been diminishing since Mrs. Pease took the stage. A boy in the middle of the row stands up and bolts for the aisle. Whether he trips in his haste or is tripped by a malicious peer, we may never discover, but he falls face-first and begins to wail. Michael, I presume. Christina hurries to his rescue, scooping him off the floor. By the way she holds him at a distance from herself, I surmise he’s wet his pants. Man, that must have been some incident on the family vacation. She rushes him out the door, but his outburst has shattered whatever equilibrium the room had achieved. Whispers and snickers ripple in all directions.

  “Settle down, everyone,” Mrs. Pease says. Now would be a good time for one of those group-silencing tricks, like have everyone who’s quiet raise their hand and wait until all hands are in the air. But before she can escalate to such a tactic, the nicotine in her system seems to make a comeback. She clutches the mike stand as if she might collapse at any second. She looks over at me and shrugs, as if to say, Hey, I did what I could, lotsa luck. Without another word of introduction, she leaves me alone onstage. As I fumble to return the microphone to the right height, Mrs. Pease makes it down the stairs and sinks into a front-row seat next to Jim, who leans fawningly over to tend to her. If I’d handed out programs, he’d be fanning her with one. The murmur of the crowd has swelled to a full-fledged clamor. No use talking. Start with a song. If music won’t soothe the little savages, it’ll at least drown them out. I launch into “Froggie Went a-Courting” with all the oomph I can summon up.

  The show is a shambles. The voice I didn’t have a chance to warm up sounds terrible through the sound system I didn’t have a chance to adjust. I cringe to hear myself, tinny and straining, reverberating through the giant room. And speaking of warming up, my fingers are still half numb, disobedient, won’t move at normal speed to fret and pluck; I’m stumbling over changes I’ve played for fifteen years. At one point I find myself choosing my next puppet based on how well it’ll insulate my hand. The other thing screwing me up is the thin line I have to walk. Too much wackiness and audience involvement and they’ll love me but get hopelessly unruly, too little and I’ll never hook them. My first couple of call-and-responses get a few of the boys so riled up that I decide to err on the side of caution. Out of deference to the unlucky teachers who will have to deal with these kids after I beat my retreat, I swallow my pride and resign myself to a deliberately lackluster performance. It goes over like a lead balloon. The kids are drifting, I’m sleepwalking, even the puppets are mailing it in.

  On the plus side, this assembly is so patently ill-timed and untenable that nobody minds when I put it out of its misery twenty minutes early. We skip the Q&A so the throng of children can be split back into classrooms, divided and conquered.

  Maureen Pease thanks me effusively. They’d love to have me back, “when things aren’t so crazy around here.”

  “Oh, that’d be nice,” I say, not bothering with sincerity.

  “We did call your manager, you know,” she reiterates peevishly.

  I wish her luck with the Harry Potter struggle and express my solidarity. Then, trailing the scraps of my shredded ego, I get the hell out of Pine Point Elementary as fast as I can.

  “Do you mind telling me what I even pay you for? If shit like this can happen?”

  I’m yelling into a pay phone at my manager. He doesn’t deserve it, but I have to yell at somebody, and I’ll start picking fights with hippies if I don’t vent to Gene. I’m standing near an entrance to Golden Gate Park. It’s a lovely day, cool and clear, and once I get a few things off my chest I plan to enjoy it.

  “What do you want me to say, Randall? I apologize. I couldn’t find you.”

  “There were protesters, Gene!”

  “So you said.”

  “They’re marching up and down outside the school! And I have to waltz in there and sing my little songs? I mean, you should have seen this place.”

  “All right, I understand. So through no fault of your own, you have one not-so-good show.”

  “Not-so-good show? Try bloodbath! People were throwing up, they were pissing themselves—”

  “
All right, all right, fine. These things happen. It’s over. Next one’ll be better.”

  I’m almost over it, actually. What’s really got me upset is the latest Y2K news, which I just caught up on at a café in the Upper Haight. Not one thing in particular but the sheer accumulation of reports and analyses. The grid will go down, no two ways about that. Other sectors are in equally bad shape, but the power grid is the sink-or-swim linchpin of the whole works, and the grid is toast. That’s painfully clear even if you believe the power companies’ own compliance statements. Most have assessed only half their systems, fixed maybe one third of them, and as for testing, don’t ask. Meanwhile, the X’s on my list of names crawl ever downward. Damien: dead meat. Frank and company: dead meat. And being in San Francisco doesn’t help my state of mind, makes me think of Hannah and dwell on what might have been. It’s all put me in a vicious funk, which I’m taking out on Gene.

  “You’re my manager, man. Next time I’d appreciate a little warning about something like this.”

  “Randall! I can’t reach you! You won’t get a cell phone, you didn’t call in, what was I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know, Gene. Just make damn sure they pay us.”

  “Of course.”

  Sensing that my outburst is over, he starts reviewing my upcoming bookings. I cut him off. “But nothing before Monday, right?”

  “Right. You gonna stay in San Francisco?”

  “At least for a day or two. Couple old friends I want to see.”

  “Good, good. Hey, Randall, take it easy. You let yourself get stressed these days. Go have a drink or something.”

  I’m way ahead of you, Gene. In my backpack are two twenty-ounce plastic bottles of lemonade, each of which is about one third vodka. My car is safely parked nearby for the night, and I’m booked into a little inn a few blocks away. More expensive than my usual lodgings, but I’m sick of frugality and didn’t want to stay in some weird little corner of town. I find a quiet spot in the park, lie down, sip my shameful cocktail, and while away the twilight hour trying to concoct a scenario in which we’ll have electric power on January 1, 2000. By the time I give up, I’ve had almost enough spiked Country Time not to care.

  chapter 6

  443

  Days

  shelly_knight1953: How’s the weather in Frisco?

  rkracc00n: foggy, but not too cold

  shelly_knight1953: Where are you?

  shelly_knight1953: Right now, I mean.

  shelly_knight1953: Right

  rkracc00n: in an Internet cafe

  My mother, the lifelong technophobe, has taken to instant messaging like a fish to water. Since her recent retirement (“taking a break from work,” she calls it), she types back and forth intermittently all day with a circle of correspondents that grows as fast as she can nag her family and friends into installing the software. She should get a job as an evangelist for AOL or something. I guess this development shouldn’t have surprised me. Mom was always a big phone chatter, and now she can keep several conversations going at once.

  Waiting for her next utterance, I gulp spring water, second liter of the day, still slaking my fierce hangover thirst. The sherry was my downfall. For the love of God, Montresor! I hate my quaint and generous hotel for putting that decanter in the room. After vodka in the park and beer at a bar, I remember stumbling in and thinking a nightcap might be nice. Then, this morning, the empty decanter and the headache. I can’t tell one kind of sherry from another, but all morning my brain has been running lines from “The Cask of Amontillado.” Had to recite it once, or translate it into French or something. Now I’m perseverating on the damn thing. For the love of God, Montresor! Yes, I said, for the love of God.

  shelly_knight1953: Sorry!

  shelly_knight1953: Was typing to Aunt Martha.

  rkracc00n: tell her hello

  rkracc00n: if she’s still on

  shelly_knight1953: Hi, Randall!

  shelly_knight1953: (She says.)

  There ensues some news from Aunt Martha. My cousin Danielle got into a little trouble with some friends from high school who were caught at a party with liquor, and one of the kids had some pot, but thankfully Danielle is too smart to partake of anything like that.

  shelly_knight1953: Oh wait, am I allowed to talk about this online?

  Mom’s perpetually paranoid about people snooping on her electronic activities, be it the Feds or some sort of ring of credit-card thieves. I’ve pointed out that the FBI generally has little interest in Ohio-born white female retired guidance counselors with no criminal record. She remains skeptical.

  rkracc00n: yes, I don’t think there’s any law against discussing your niece’s friends’ misdemeanors

  I still think of Danielle as an ungovernable four-year-old hellraiser, tantruming around the living room at family gatherings, eating needles off the Christmas tree, and tying the cat to the furniture. Now she’s had her first drug bust. They grow up so fast.

  shelly_knight1953: Any thoughts of flying down here for a day or two while you’re in California?

  I don’t mention that I drove right past Mom’s longitude two days ago. My last Santa Fe visit was so frustrating that I didn’t even consider detouring a few hundred miles to repeat the experience.

  rkracc00n: sorry, don’t think I can fit it in…pretty much booked up

  shelly_knight1953: Okay, well, if you did want to, Ted knows someone who can get you a good last-minute plane fare.

  Of course he does. My mother’s husband of four years is the biggest guy-knower I’ve ever come across. You need a good tax attorney? He knows a guy. In the market for Oriental carpeting? There’s a guy he knows in Tucson. It’s a real gift, being able to keep track of all these guys. I’d be forever confusing the piano-tuning guy with the guy who can expedite your application for a vanity license plate. Ted is also a champion schmoozer, a glad-hander, and an angle-coverer. If he ever decides to sell Amway, look out. Not that he needs a business opportunity, since he’s already a minor kingpin in the world of Southwestern real estate development. Ted’s impossible not to like but impossible to love. Something about the constant stream of advice-giving and situation-improving precludes intimacy, and I just can’t bring myself to see him as a real member of my immediate family. Hopefully Mom feels otherwise. Or has she settled, as Nicole claims, for financial security at the expense of passion, fulfillment, et cetera? I think I’d rather not know.

  Ted’s overbearing planfulness would have served them well, though, if I could have convinced them to take Y2K seriously. There’d be a guy he knows in Taos who sells water filtration systems, or he’d know a guy who could help them pull their assets out of the soon-to-plummet stock market with a minimal early-withdrawal penalty. But it was no go. New Mexico was against me from the start. If you want to open someone’s eyes to the likelihood of anarchy overtaking our technology-addled society, you can’t pick a much worse setting than a sprawling ranch house outside Santa Fe in August. The spacious sky silently refuted my doomy hypotheses, and my vivid predictions of urban chaos rang hollow as we sipped iced tea on the balmy porch.

  The climate wasn’t the real problem, though. Mom was. She didn’t contradict a thing I said. Instead, she acted as if I hadn’t said anything at all. She turned in the boldest performance of virtuoso subject-changing I’ve ever witnessed. “It’s entirely possible that the banking system in its present form won’t be around by the middle of next year,” I’d say. And after a thoughtful nod she’d come back with “Do you realize in November we’ll have been in Santa Fe three years?” As if she’d heard only the word “year.” Really, it was extraordinary to watch. I might even have suspected early Alzheimer’s, but she had no trouble with other topics. Only my millennial pedagogy made her so stubbornly tangential. As if what I was saying was simply too unpleasant to reconcile with her pleasant existence in this pleasant place, so she just willed her brain not to process it. And Ted took his cues from her, fell uncharacteristically silent
, gazed into the middle distance with a thoughtful half-smile. I’m always prepared with an arsenal of rejoinders to pollyannaish denial. But Mom’s whole new species of denial, not of my claims but of the very fact that I was claiming anything, knocked me off my stride. My research rendered moot, I sulked in the glorious sunshine for most of the weekend, strumming a few cowboy tunes while Ted hummed along.

  And Mom stonewalls the same way on IM. By this point I bring it up more to get a sad laugh out of her predictability than from any hope of breaking through.

  rkracc00n: they’re now saying that most of the nuclear power plants in the country will be shut down by the gov’t. in 1999…

  shelly_knight1953: We went to an interesting new place last night where you can grill your own meat!

  rkracc00n: for safety reasons, due to Y2K noncompliance

  shelly_knight1953: Well, not exactly grill your own. You pick it out (meat, fish, vegetables) and they grill it up right in front of you.

  I tried sitting my stepfather down for a man-to-man heart-to-heart. He blew smoke up my ass, assured me that he had things well in hand. They’d buy some extra cans of food, spare flashlight batteries. I pressed harder, gesticulated, said that wasn’t enough, this is far beyond a simple hurricane or winter storm. “I hear you, I hear you”—Ted nodded and mm-hmmed me into submission, diffusing my intensity with his customer-is-always-right verbal spongebath. “Let me set your mind at ease, son.” (Ted always says “son” but manages to convey that he doesn’t mean it in the “think of me as your father” sense.) “Your mother’s well taken care of. I’ll tell you something, I love that woman.” And some bottled water, and emergency cash stashed in a safe place, and hey, maybe we will look into a generator. And all shall be well.