by Wesley Stace
“Who wants a bite of this?” Everyone! This was likely to be a disaster. “Now who’s fussy about their crusts? I hope no one’s fussy about crusts. You don’t want to be one of those kids with parents, like: Oh yes she’ll eat anything—oh sure! But no jelly . . . and cut off the crusts . . . on the diagonal . . . make one a circle.” He cut the sandwich into quarters and passed them to beseeching hands in the front row. “Alright! Now, no mess. But it’s going to get kinda messy up here!” He jabbed his finger into the jar and pulled out a big scoop. “And, you guys, and your moms, while we’re talking peanut butter, it’s okay to put a little butter on your toast and spread the peanut butter on the actual butter like we do in England. It’s just called “peanut butter”; it isn’t really butter at all. Anyway, trouble is peanut butter is so dry. If I ate this scoop, I wouldn’t be able to talk for ages.”
“Eat it! Eat it!”
So Blake ate it and everyone cheered. Then he took another scoop and placed half down each side of his face like Red Indian war paint. More cheering. And then he took off his red suit jacket, and started to rub the peanut butter all over his face, sipping from a bottle of water. The kids went nuts. Even the parents were laughing.
“What do you guys want to hear?”
“‘Rock Around the Bed’!”
“I said what do you guys want to hear?”
“‘Rock Around the Bed’!”
“I can’t hear you!”
“‘Rock Around the Bed’!”
Blake flung the peanut butter up into the air, somehow splattering its contents along a wall of amplifiers—it was that oily, gooey, healthy kind that separates in the fridge, the kind you need to stir just to reconstitute it. Jack looked askance (they weren’t his amps, but equipment was equipment and not to be messed on or with), but Blake didn’t notice.
“Then let’s Rock Around the Bed!”
Curtis counted it off, and the audience—what with the flying peanut butter and the teasing frenzy and the mucky lead singer—went completely berserk. Mothers halted their feeding sessions to wade into the maelstrom; the most charitable explanation was that they were keeping a closer eye on their offspring, but it seemed to me that they just wanted to be nearer the fun. At the side of the stage, the other rock band, looking like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, was in fraught consultation with their own crew over the peanut butter situation. The Wonderkids’ show ended with a climactic chord that seemed to go on for about thirty seconds and then the band was off and the lights went up. House music piped, in and the audience tried to reunite with the other members of their families, before converging on me like a swarm of bees.
Blake was collared by one of the rock band’s crew: “Who do you think you are? Iggy Pop?”
“Iggy Poop!” said Blake triumphantly, scuttling by, leaving Mitchell in charge. By the time Blake materialized at the merch booth, he was all cleaned up, back in his red suit, smiling. We shifted more units (I was getting down with the jargon) than ever. Blake was beside himself, a gleam in his eye: “Wonderkids Peanut Butter! Sell it in a jar with a Wonderkids label.” He was joking, but you knew someone in management would take that idea very seriously, and that I and the merch company would be left to organize the lugging of crates of Wonderkids brand peanut butter across the mezzanines of America.
While Blake greeted his peanut buttered child army, Mitchell worked his charm, and the other band calmed down. Becca came out as the line was finally thinning: “Quite a party back there.”
When we eventually made it backstage, the party was still in full swing. The other lot had started boozing early, as if to show the kids’ band how it was done, while the Wonderkids could do as they pleased; they were finished for the day. Jack was in conversation with the other band’s guitar player; Curtis was talking to a young man of unknown provenance; even Mitchell—who had completed the day’s business—was relaxing, though he still sat upright as if taking a class in deportment. A couple of mothers nervously decorated the room, obstacles wherever they stood. It was the first time backstage had been breached.
A whiff of pot—it was my first encounter, but I knew from Jack’s conspiratorial wink—wafted from the other dressing room. Blake disappeared within for a little while: his intention probably an apology, doubtless best achieved by the sharing of marijuana. I was drinking an ice-cold Coke out of the bottle: it was nice to have contributed my own quirky demand to the rider. Blake stumbled back into the room—eyes a little bloodshot, smile a little broader—and crashed onto the sofa.
“Now that, my friends, was a show.”
“We may have to take it easy on the flinging of condiments,” remarked Mitchell casually, ushering non-bandmembers away like an apologetic high society host who simply has to go to bed.
“Yeah, my mistake. But did you see those kids go! We’re showing them real rock ’n’ roll. We can recreate it all for them: forget Iggy Pop, though I could easily wear a horsetail. Rod Stewart always used to kick footballs into the crowd.”
“Until they started kicking them back,” said Mitchell, the voice of reason. “It’s all very funny till someone gets hurt.” Blake was hardly paying attention. There was a fantastical look in his eyes. He had seen the future.
“How about,” said Becca, entering into the spirit, “biting the head off a chicken?”
“Bit of Alice Cooper,” said Mitchell. “Nice.”
They were joking, but Blake wasn’t, and he went off on a riff: rubber chickens, cuddly chickens, organizing them so candy poured out of them: “They don’t mind beating the crap out of a piñata when the feeling takes them.” He sounded a bit like his father.
Beers were opened. Even Curtis, who was always the last to join in, cracked one. Blake had started a list in his ubiquitous notebook; he was mapping out the Wonderkids’ live show for the next two years. Every now and then he’d pipe up: “How about the ELO spaceship! Fog machines, lasers, but not a spaceship, obviously. Maybe a massive pram, stroller, whatever.”
“Pricey,” said Mitchell.
“Or how about that idiot who used to play the keyboards upside down?”
“Keith Emerson,” said Jack. “And didn’t he used to stick knives in his Hammond organ as well?”
“No KNIVES!” shouted Mitchell, over everyone’s laughter. “Are you all insane? How did we get from peanut butter to knives?”
“Plastic knives? Sporks? Runcible Spoons? We’re just chatting,” said Blake. “Sweet, tomorrow. You and me, back of the bus—we’re going to work this one out together.”
“I’ve got to deal with the new onesies tomorrow. But I can do both. No problem.”
“Okay. Let’s check into the hotel, and then see this band. And I’ll tell you something.” Blake’s head bowed in a stage whisper. “However good they are. I’ll bet they don’t whip it up like we did.”
They were surprisingly good, and of course they didn’t.
Jack didn’t make it to the gig. We found him back at our hotel fern bar, deep in conversation with a woman. I took one look at her and wondered whether I’d seen her breasts that afternoon at the show: weird. But what would she be doing here if I had? Who was looking after the baby? Her husband? Her mother? Jack gave us a casual wave that seemed to invite us to keep our distance or, if we approached, our conversation to a minimum, so we headed back to our rooms.
The next morning, we mustered, waiting for the bus to leave. (Barry had once taken Blake and Jack on a cruise ship, the legacy of which was a surprising amount of nautical language: it was always “mustering” and using “the head,” occasionally known as the “poop deck.”) Jack made a brief appearance in the lobby, then headed back upstairs with two cups of coffee. I exchanged a look with Blake, but he surprised me: “I bet there’s no one up there at all. He’s a proud man, our Jack.”
“Two cups of coffee?”
“Well, exactly,” said Blake, making me feel very young.
Jack was always the last to get to the bus. It was a matter of prid
e: an elder brother thing, Blake said. Jack hated waiting around for people, but didn’t mind people waiting around for him. Blake would sometimes lay a trap, and we’d look up at the precise moment that Jack opened up his curtain to check if we were ready to roll.
“Bastard,” said Blake, smiling and waving up at him. “We’ve mustered! We’re mustard!”
A few months goes by in a blur: we were in our stride now. You only really remember the days you have off and the days you go home. You’re in a bubble, and you try to make it resemble real life as much as possible. But it’s easy to see how some people turn that into their actual existence—always on the run with cash in your pocket and no bills, a road manager who sorts out everything that you don’t want to—because decompression can give you the bends.
Celebrities came to visit us after the show. Kids are kids, and regardless how famous their parents, they want to do the things that other kids want to do, and if these famous parents have the juice, their kids get extra treats. “The cheese,” Mitchell called it. “They’re getting the cheese.” One famous comedian came onto the bus with his gawky daughter. A tall man, he stooped and sat awkwardly, his long legs seeming to take up the width of the bus. He’d never seemed so tall on TV. He told us stories of this and that, congratulating the band on the show, shaking Jack’s hand and saying “crack band!” (which Jack, it later turned out, misheard as “crap band”). As he was leaving, Blake said: “Hey, put this on for a photo!” pinning a Wonderkids badge on his suit. It was all smiles, but the moment the photo was taken, the comedian looked down at the button and said: “What does it say? ‘Asshole’?” After that he was, indeed, forever known as Asshole.
All good merch tables are the same (the only difference: how much lighting is available to you), but bad merch tables are infinite in their crapness. So we took to carrying our own. It was me and Vern from the merch company who did all the ordering and reordering, much to Blake’s disapproval. He said I should be having a good time, and I was. Vern didn’t travel with us—just popped in from time to time to check in. We got on well. He showed me the ropes, told me stories. His party piece was the one about the eighties power ballad band. He was just a lowly guy at the company, and every night the lonely ladies who loved that band, and in particular their unavoidable classic “Can’t Stop Lovin’ You Forever,” would, at the beginning of the show, buy single roses to throw onstage at their idols’ feet. And every night those same roses would be swept up and thrown away. It was Vern who did the math and made the inspired suggestion: “Plastic roses!” And ever after, they sold those lonely ladies plastic roses, which were thrown on stage in exactly the same way; but at the end of the night they weren’t thrown away; they were harvested, carefully washed, sprayed with fake rose aroma, and sold at the next show.
“That,” said Vern, “is how you make a career in this business.”
Genius. I told the unflappable Mitchell, and even he was impressed.
All of life was at the merch table. Some people refused change, as though I personally needed the money; other people came to the table with no money at all, as though that was going to do them any good. Some people looked at everything, slowly, and bought nothing; other people just stepped up and bought the whole lot. I saw it all: people trying to bust open the shrink-wrap with their incisors; people who bought their own little shrink-wrap openers, perhaps stolen from a previous merchandise booth—I mean, who carries those?; people who asked for autographs for daughters who skulked in the background; people who asked for autographs for daughters who didn’t exist; people who brought those rattling gold paint markers that they had to shake before they exploded over the page, leaving Blake to make a design out of the glut of ink; people who just wanted your name without a dedication because, presumably, they wanted to sell the autograph to the highest bidder; people who bought two or three of a certain item and wanted different names on every one; people who insisted on a very wordy and specific dedication; people who just wanted to show Blake pictures of their collection of Thomas the Tank Engines. And the same names came up but spelled differently: Cathryn, Catherine, Katherine, Kathryn, Katrine—and then, when you thought you knew them all, some weird Irish version with Gs and Hs. Blake knew when to ask.
One night, Vern and I were at the booth and, about two songs into the set, a guy came to buy some CDs, prior to what I thought an oddly premature departure. I asked why he was leaving, while also wondering why he appeared to be wearing headphones, and he said: “I have to, before it gets too loud.” Then he added: “I have tinnitus,” which he pronounced tinny-tus.
And I said: “Tinnitus?,” pronounced tin-eye-tus, which is how I thought you said it.
He looked a little put out and, as he turned towards the exit, clasping his Wonderkids CDs, he explained in frustration: “NO! ALL THE TIME!”
9
“Has anyone got a little Irish in them? Are there any girls who’d like a little more Irish in them?”
BROTHERS. BLOOD IS THICKER THAN WATER. (GREG USED TO USE THE phrase to mean someone was really stupid: “He’s thicker than water, that one.”)
With Blake and Jack, there wasn’t any Kinks action: Ray and Dave Davies scrapping onstage, low-flying cymbals, etc. Nor, at the other extreme, was there any Everly Brothers “nothing sounds sweeter than brothers in harmony.” (Mind you, all fraternal harmony got the Everlys was a Gibson smashed live onstage, a public row, and ten years of silence.) Blake and Jack were the Wonderkids, everyone knew that. They were quick to argue, quick to make up. The absolute worst you ever heard from Jack was “Fuck you!” That was it. Done. They didn’t fall into the trap of flaunting the brother thing. That was the trouble with the other brother bands—they bought into the whole Brothers in Arms thing. Dire Straits even called an album that, though Mark Knopfler’s own brother had had actually ditched the band a few years earlier.
Blake never suggested I call him “Dad”; I called Becca “Mum” but I never called my dad “Dad.” He referred to himself that way, but was always Blake to me. I once tried out “Uncle” on Jack: he didn’t like it at all. Blake was a man of whims, and Jack assumed me to be one of those: he knew that the genius lay somewhere in the whims, he just had no idea precisely where. Though he didn’t disapprove of the adoption, the position of “uncle” implicated him too greatly. He liked to think of Blake as “childish”—which he knew was at once the best and worst thing about his brother: the fount of all his creativity and the reason things occasionally went haywire—though he never used the actual word. But the fact was: Jack was the more childish of the two, despite his being the businessman in the band. He was the one who needed looking after.
When Jack’s guitar broke that spring, he was heartbroken. It was an old electric from the Watch With Mother days that he’d had shipped from the UK, not at all valuable but his favorite. During a show, a speaker crashed onto his guitar rack, snapping its neck. “That’ll never be played again” was Mitchell’s frank verdict as he leafed through the contract for the venue’s insurance policy. It was “one of those things,” and the policy excluded any of those things. “Act of God,” concluded Mitchell. “You’ll need a new neck.” Jack wouldn’t stand for it. Wouldn’t be the same instrument. It seemed the ideal opportunity to pore over those guitar catalogs or visit one of the guitar emporia whose business cards he amassed as we traveled. Instead, Jack went into weird mourning. He literally wore black for a week.
“I dunno.” Jack shook his head as if in a daze.
“It’s just like a goldfish dying,” said Blake to cheer him up. “You have to replace it without telling the kids.”
In the bus at about ten the following morning, Jack poured himself a glass of whisky, on a Benadryl chaser, and went to sleep, whisky glass perched on his right shoulder. I took a photo. He was dreaming of his old guitar, his fingers dancing across the fret board. Blake’s sitting next to him, making sure the whisky doesn’t fall.
It was a strange trail the Wonderkids were blazing and the
ir success led to copycat signings. America was opening its arms to life beyond Simeon’s House and Sesame Street. There were contenders, but no one—no one—like the Wonderkids. The band wasn’t inimitable, but their ascent had been quick, and no one had yet worked out how to do a good impression. Part of the initial success was that they were characters, like the Beatles were characters, like that loony from Jethro Tull was a character, like Cheap Trick—with the two heartthrobs and the two nerds—were characters. The Wonderkids recalled the madcap glory days of rock ’n’ roll, the unabashed celebration of id that predated the anger of punk and the seriousness of indie and shoegazing; perfect for kids, but easy for the adults to love too. And of course, no one was doing anything to dispel the myth that they’d been huge at home—too big, really, for Britain to handle.
We were now on a perpetual tour: it didn’t matter precisely where we were, but it was nice to know. Sometimes it was raining on the short walk backstage from the bus and sometimes it wasn’t. Itineraries, if they weren’t lost, were traded in, the same way you’d return a library book and check out a new one. The novelty had worn off.