Wonderkid

by Wesley Stace

  “To own his each,” said Greg gnomically.

  There was a hitch.

  Nick explained his vision—Rock Music FOR KIDS!—to Greg who nodded sagely, wondering how on earth he was going to get this by the band, trying to imagine the construction of even the most basic explanatory sentence that he could complete without them running in terror.

  As Nick went on to outline the budget that was at his disposal, Greg had the uncharacteristically violent urge to reach for the phone, ring his lawyer, and scream “HELP!” Ten percent meant he could retire. And it was at that moment, with that realization, that he inked a date to resign as the Wunderkinds’ manager, a date about six months after the contract was signed. His job was simply to shepherd the deal through. He would be quite content to be the one who got the band signed, then walked away. He could live with that. And when the band was sitting at some award ceremony, all those years in the future, they’d invite him to sit with them, because it was his award too, even though in another sense it had nothing to do with him.

  “Well,” said Greg, throwing up his hands with a smile. “It’s all wonderful. The only thing is, I just can’t tell you how the band’s going to react to that. I just can’t say.”

  “Greg. I’m going to put my money where my mouth is, because I believe this can work. I’ve spoken to Norm, and Norm thinks this can work too. He says hi by the way; asked how Pam was. First, our lawyer is going to talk to your lawyer. And then your lawyer is going to talk to you. And then the band is going to come and talk to me. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen. And by the time they leave that door . . .”

  “. . . you’ll be able to do a quick line right here.”

  “Those days are gone, my friend. And good riddance.”

  “Shame,” said Greg wistfully, though he never did drugs, never had: none. But the characters had, lots, and those had been the best days of all, because drugs made men bold. The characters had signed a band simply because they liked them or their manager. And then they had worked the band and given that band at least three chances: no one minded if the first one wasn’t a smash, you were just setting up the second, good reviews were nice; and the second album, well, you wanted to see something happening, but maybe it wouldn’t happen until the third. And then the third, and maybe curtains . . . but you had room to develop, to grow, and if you didn’t have a career by the end of the third, or at the very least a live following, then you were in the wrong line of work. And then that band was dropped, and either everything was groovy or blame was apportioned and grudges held. But both had been fine. Nowadays, you got one shot. And you never made any money on the back-end, so you might as well spend as much as you possibly could at the beginning. It wasn’t how business should be done.

  Greg was wrestling with that introductory sentence to the band, but perhaps he didn’t even have to come up with one. Perhaps Nick would do the dirty work for him. All he had to do was get them in this office; then catch the eye of various members and raise his eyebrow in either amusement, horror, or consideration, whichever seemed most appropriate.

  The whole band was in Nick’s office the next day.

  Greg had been advised on the best lawyer (by his own lawyer, who knew he was out of his league), that lawyer had received and recounted Endymion’s first offer, which was sensational and offered substantial “wiggle room,” which meant, essentially, that it was beyond sensational. The band was overjoyed: Endymion was serious. Wanted would be told. Greg would do it, of course he would, and everyone would come out of it fine. Wanted would understand. And they would understand. No one worried about that now. This was a different playing field. Or, rather, it was a whole new ball game on a different playing field, as Greg put it.

  And in Nick’s office, Greg sat in the very chair where less than a week before Laurie had seen the pile of crappy tapes, and watched Nick give a master class in A&R. Nick got to his point, so subtly and so charmingly, making it seem that success with the children’s demographic would never, could never, overtake the band’s success with adults, and would indeed be a tribute to their songwriting—“universal popularity” was the phrase he kept using. And hadn’t rock always been for children?

  Of course, there would be certain stipulations about brand and image in the contract, but Nick downplayed these until they seemed piffling considerations, and Greg found that he was not fielding the expected quizzical or shocked looks from his wards; rather they stared at Nick, mouths open, divvying the money in their heads. Far from worrying whether an appearance on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop represented a prostitution of their talent or a potential blow to their credibility, they were wondering only when they could buy the gear they’d always wanted, get into a proper studio, and start recording.

  Nick loved the songs. He loved them so much: he thought “Lucky Duck” might be the first single, but he loved “Rock Around the Bed,” too, and he told the band that wonderful story of his son punching his fist in the air, before he happened to mention that there might have to be an edit, perhaps the song was a little too long as it was, and if they were going to make a snip perhaps it should be the stuff about the girl in the last verse, which seemed the obvious edit, really.

  “A bit long maybe,” murmured Blake, lost in a dream.

  And Greg knew only too well what was happening; it was as if the band were hypnotized. Nick couldn’t wait to hear more songs: had they thought about a producer? He had a couple of ideas. Yes, the obvious names. But those songs, he could hear them speaking to everyone, not kids particularly, everyone, and that was how you had hit singles. That was when Blake said the magic words: “Well, I do kind of write with children in mind.”

  And it was true. And it was all over.

  The Wunderkinds were dead: long live the Wunderkinds.

  In the pub afterwards, they ordered round upon round.

  “Whoa! Whoa,” said Greg. “Don’t spend your advance all at once!” Suddenly Greg was the voice of reason. “Now you know . . . and it’s great, and I love you all for being so open to it . . . but you know what he’s basically asking you to be right?” Why he was trying to dissuade them now he couldn’t fathom. Perhaps it was the last vestige of his managerly duty. Perhaps he was only doing it because he knew they couldn’t be dissuaded. His 10 percent was safe.

  “We’re not fools,” said Jack, sipping a Jack Daniels, an unusual celebratory foray beyond beer. “I’m not. This is my shot,” he said, lifting his glass with a smile, “and I’m going to take it.” He downed it in one and slammed the glass on the table.

  “Okay. Devil’s advocate,” said Greg. Best to get the home truths out of the way. “Can you think of another band that has been marketed specifically at kids?”

  The Chipmunks. Pinky and Perky. Rolf Harris. The Partridge Family. They couldn’t really think of one.

  “The Monkees!” said Tom Twin triumphantly. Everyone drank to that.

  “Look. Good music will win out!” said Jack. “Nick said . . .”

  “Ooh, I know,” said Blake, “let’s call him Mr. Hedges. Wing Commander Hedges. No, Mr. Hedges.”

  “. . . Mr. Hedges said we could play our songs, in our way, and that nothing was going to change.”

  “He suggested edits. You have yet to make the album,” Greg reminded them. “He’s an A&R man. He’s going to A&R. He’ll A&R you within an inch of your life. You’re gonna be A&Red up the A&Arse. It’s gonna be one long A&Rgument.” He was pulling out all the stops.

  “Jack’s right. We want to be heard,” said Blake.

  “You could be on Wanted and sell 500 copies,” said Greg, making it sound as somewhat great as possible.

  “I think Mr. Hedges has seen something about us,” Blake continued, “and I think he might be right. It always felt a bit like we were raiding the costume box and performing at the grown-up party, didn’t it?”

  “Then, great,” said Greg. He couldn’t believe his luck, their luck, everyone’s luck. “But when you sign that dotted line, and
I’d say this whoever you were signing for, I want you to have no illusions that this is going to go the best way possible. Think of the worst possible way it can go and double it. And that’s your future.”

  “Fucking hell,” said Jack. “Why are you at your most miserable when you should be happiest? You’ve just got us an amazing record deal. We’ve all made some money. Cheer up, mate. It might never happen.”

  “I’m managing,” said Greg. “This is what I do.”

  “Besides, you’ll be with us,” said Blake. “Fighting our corner; good times and bad times; down in the foxhole; making sure we get what we want?”

  “Course I will.”

  But, in Greg’s mind, he had already resigned. The fight would be too great; the band would be too disappointed; the retreat too tragic.

  He never had to work another day in his life.

  5

  “Man, I just work here.”

  IN OUR SALAD DAYS, THE WONDERFAMILY DID A LOT OF TRAVELING, always by bus. Kids were never buckled, never clunked or clicked; they roamed freely. There was a full refrigerator, a twenty-four-hour deli tray, Twizzlers waving like a bouquet of deadheaded flowers. Even the bunks—the “coffins”—didn’t feel lonely; they just promised hide and seek, and the corridor made an excellent gauntlet. There were only three rules: sleep with your feet towards the driver, no bowel movements in the toilet, and, most importantly, don’t get left behind.

  I remember holidays with my foster parents: holding it in on the long, long drive; “Are we there yet?”; “First to see the sea!”; the inevitable attempt at reading followed by the equally inevitable bout of car sickness and “Look out the window” or “Rub mint on your hands.” They actually brought a little plastic bag of fresh mint on car journeys, which never once worked. Just as a menthol cigarette is no less disgusting than a regular one, minty vomit wasn’t tastier than standard. There wasn’t even a cassette player in the car, just a radio, which my foster father, Terry, didn’t like to turn on: the stated reason being that it impeded conversation, giving the impression there was conversation to impede. The truth is he didn’t like music of any variety—or conversation for that matter. The major project of his life was to ensure that everybody lived in tomb-like silence. There wasn’t a volume knob in the world he couldn’t lower.

  “How can you do your homework with that racket on?” he’d yell from the hall, much louder than whatever music was playing. Then he’d march in, turn the racket down with a theatrical gesture much at odds with the rest of his dour personality, and leave, breathing the sigh of relief of a man about whose throat a garrote has recently been loosened. Irony being, I could concentrate better with it on.

  So, no radio; and reading was out, and conversation never got going, despite the dead air. Terry once went so far as to claim that a radio sapped a car’s battery. He was equally passive-aggressive about the heating. Cold silence: that was the goal.

  If I have kids, should I have kids, we shall talk in the car; we shall play I Spy, Number Plates, and all the other WonderBus favorites. Blake knew every parlor game that didn’t require either a board or a pen and paper to keep score. He’d improvise surreal new rules for the Laughter Game and the Yes and No Game, stretching them out to absurd, distance-busting lengths. He knew every lateral thinking exercise and made up new ones at the drop of a hat. A man arrives at a hotel and immediately finds out he has no money, why? (He’s playing Monopoly). A man takes an elevator to the fourth floor and then walks to his apartment on the ninth, why? (He’s a dwarf and can’t reach a higher button.) The surgeon is a woman; the snowman has melted; the parachute hadn’t opened—he knew them all. A rite of passage for newcomers was to sit in a circle as we passed a pair of scissors around and declared them either crossed or uncrossed: the right answer depended on your legs rather than the scissors, but first-timers were slow to cotton on. Wink Murder evolved into something called Mafia. Once, I was killed, went to my coffin, and woke the next morning, three states later, to find them still at it. And Blake taught us how to take an amaretto wrapper, smooth it into a tube, and set fire to it: just when you think it’s going to burn the carpet, the vacuum sends it flying angel-like back into the air. The Terrys would have had a conniption! That was the thing: Blake behaved like one of the kids. Terry could hardly bear to hear anything once; Blake had the ability to listen to a piece of music or watch a video over and over again. “It’s great,” he’d say, “you just get more out of it each time.” Blake was a kid’s dream come true, straight out of one of his own crazy songs.

  No meal was complete without the demonstration of some bizarre trick from his repertoire involving, say, a match and the balancing of an interlocked fork and spoon on the top edge of a glass. They weren’t technically magic tricks, though he knew those as well—he always carried a fake thumb tip and a hankie in his back pocket—just crap his mind had never thrown away. He left a trail of origami behind him like the guy in Blade Runner. (It was how he cured himself of biting his nails.) Best of all, though I was always terrible at it, was the game where you had to reply to the previous person completely irrelevantly. He called it the Nonsense Game. It was hard. It’s hard not to make sense when that’s all you know how to do.

  And if I do have kids, about which (after years of superstitious pessimism) I have become increasingly optimistic, there will be more than one of them. Because being an only child, in the back of your foster parents’ car, when you can’t read a book because you’ll vomit, and when the radio can’t be played because it impedes conversation, and when the elderly couple in the front bicker all the time (except for the occasional smirk), and it feels like everything is just about to boil over but, worst of all, endlessly simmers . . . Because being an only child is not a great thing to be.

  I always wanted a brother or a sister (I probably had one all along, but this was the era before Facebook weakened the hermetic quality of life as a foster child), someone to wrestle with and argue with, play music with, steal from, tease. At the orphanage, before I was fostered, it was like you had too many brothers and sisters, but none you really trusted, and none specifically yours. Then with the Terrys (he was Terry and she was Teri) it was worse. They had their own son, of course, Ian, much older, out in the world. I was their charity case, a distraction in retirement; they “had the money,” wanted to “give something back.” They weren’t bad people, but they were too old—something they realized soon but not soon enough. There was never a suggestion of their formally adopting me, and every sign that they’d give me up at the drop of a hat. I was the antithesis of all the things they liked: cold silence and no sugar.

  Life with the Terrys was trying for all parties involved, so I signed up for any number of after-school classes purely to delay my return to their welcome mat. My eventual route took me past the orphanage (officially a “child care centre” called The Clement Bagley, or Clements), where I’d inevitably see a couple of the kids playing Ping-Pong on that same warped table in the front window; you couldn’t help feel a pang of nostalgia for the racket.

  The goal had always been to leave Clements: we called it “The Great Escape,” but I couldn’t say—I still can’t—that I preferred life with my foster parents. With the Terrys, nothing was up to me. At Clements, so recently, I’d finally been made a monitor: it wasn’t much, but I liked the responsibility. I got to read bedtime stories, which inspired me to organize a pre-bedtime Olympiad to tire the little kids out (so I didn’t have to read so long). At thirteen, I was a natural organizer. I even did some of the supervisors’ work for them, which they didn’t mind one bit. Once I made a chart for a table-tennis competition, with name tabs you could slot into the appropriate position in the league table. On the strength of this, Harmon, the “director” (the previous guy hadn’t had a title), asked me to draw up the duty roster, presumably because no one else could be bothered. It wasn’t slave labor, though Blake later cited it as evidence of my supposedly lost childhood; I just liked doing that stuff. For example, the
re was this profoundly antiquated behavior rating system for the kids. I designed the chart they still use, redrawn every year but still to my blueprint, on which the good order marks (red) and bad order marks (black) are stuck next to each student’s name. Woe betide the kid with five bad order marks. (Luckily, I was both the only person who knew precisely where the stickers were sold, and the only one with the knack of unpeeling them cleanly, so I could surreptitiously remove bad, or supplement good, at will. Harmon was none the wiser. Both the staff and my peers thought I’d found my true calling.)

  For years I’d been made to feel “unfosterable,” yet all of a sudden I found myself paraded in the director’s office like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Perhaps I never had been “unfosterable”; perhaps I was just never fostered. I always wondered whether Harmon had palmed me to the bottom of the deck. We hadn’t got on from the beginning. When he took over, I was summoned, as we all were in turn, to his office. I was ten and happened to be barefoot. He asked me where my shoes were, and I said “Cobblers, sir.” Bad order mark. The very next day, he saw me with my tennis racket and said all friendly: “I didn’t know you had a Head,” and I said: “It’s what I talk out of.” He gave me a look like I’d spat in his porridge.

  And there he was, still in his office, oblivious to the Ping-Pong on the other side of the wall, marking up my duty roster.

  At home, after the briefest dinner, usually eaten to the riveting soundtrack of the Terrys’ evaluation of my table manners, I’d turn on the music and do my homework until the music was turned off and I could no longer concentrate. For Christmas, the Terrys bought me a pair of headphones, largely for their own benefit.

  At fourteen, I was a loner. The Terrys had just sent me on my first ever sleepover with Brian, a boy I liked only in their imagination. For whatever reason, our forced friendship was desirable. I like to think that I was shipped off to accommodate the Terrys’ annual coupling, but it was probably so they could have a little peace and quiet or, in the wildest scenario, play bridge.