by Wesley Stace
“Agreed,” said Blake.
“We want this to present the seriously fun side of the band, and we want the network on our side. Let them know exactly what we’re going to do.”
“Okay. So you basically want us to plan something like exactly what caused us so much trouble last time, but tell people in advance.”
“Look, Blake,” said Andy. “We don’t want to give MOMs cause for complaint.”
“Leave it with us,” said Mitchell. “Blake, let’s talk.”
It’s a wonder people took MOMs seriously, but their PMRC affiliation got column inches, and Jacquelyn Belmer’s proto-MILF act didn’t hurt. She called the Wonderkids “one of the greatest evils facing America today.” Like Communism? Like the Beatles when John said they were bigger than God? Jesus Christ.
“They’re afraid of rock ’n’ roll,” said Blake. “And they’re afraid of us. So we should give them more rock ’n’ roll. The whole history of rock ’n’ roll.”
He laughed MOMs off, but it was an irritant. He didn’t seem to understand that there was cause for concern; the members of the band were not ideal children’s entertainers. Two of them were fine—the two that didn’t matter. But the other two . . .
That night we were on the road, and I picked up some random video I found in the front: Laura, scribbled in capital letters on the spine in Sharpie. Jack had already gone to bed.
“Oh yeah,” said Blake, who was making snacks. “Great flick. Clifton Webb. Gene Tierney. You’ll love it.”
“Shall we watch up here, Mitchell?”
“Throw that classy entertainment on, sir.”
I slotted in the VHS, and sat back in my usual place, recently shifted a few feet to the right of a stain that I feared was the legacy of Jack’s humping. Before I’d made myself comfortable, a stereophonic groaning indicated that this wasn’t the black-and-white classic Blake and Mitchell had imagined. Mitchell looked up. Blake turned from the kitchenette. We were confronted with a close-up of a screaming woman in the middle of shuddering sex. All you could see was her face. The moaning was earsplittingly loud.
“What the bejeesus is that?” A rare communication from Good Buddy.
“Yeah, yeah, sorry,” said Blake nonchalantly, as corn popped in the microwave.
Mitchell had the presence of mind to reach for the remote control, mute the sound, then turn off the television. It’s a funny thing to admit, but I’d never seen pornography (though I’d heard Jack talk about it enough), and it genuinely shocked me. At first I’d thought someone was killing her. If this was pornography, rather than, like, a slasher movie, was it always so amateur-looking?
“That was yours?” I asked Blake.
“Yeah, yeah.”
Mitchell laughed: “What’s it doing spilling out here? Keep it back in your lair. We’d only need the presence of a young child and a representative from MOMS for the moment to be complete.”
“Well, thank the Lord that the Happy Campers weren’t here,” said Blake, as he ejected the tape. He winked at me.
Subject broached, I said, “Yeah, it’s a bit like a religious cult on that bus. Like they’re all going to be wearing purple raiment soon. It’s all a bit Heaven, you know, where nothing ever happens.”
“Hmmm.” Mitchell declined to commit himself. I remembered what he’d said: all the children were under his wing.
“Well, maybe we’ll just put HELL on the front of this bus, and HEAVEN on the front of theirs. Can you do that, Randy?”
“If you want it to say HELL on the front of the bus, then that’s what it’ll say.”
Turning to China, Blake said to Mitchell: “Get us that hair dryer, man, will you?”
“I’m not going to get you a hair dryer that you never use.”
“Just please get me the hair dryer. Good night.”
After the door closed, Mitchell casually remarked: “Wasn’t his tape.”
“Doesn’t seem like his kind of thing.” Mitchell didn’t answer, just shrugged without looking at me. “Wasn’t mine,” I added, unnecessarily defensively.
“Wasn’t mine either,” said Mitchell. “And we know who carries the video camera. Things are bubbling.”
Once, around this time, Blake and I were walking down a hotel corridor, ready for “the out,” rolling our suitcases, me carrying his uke. As usual he was a pace or two behind. We had left the room talking about some or other trivia, nothing of importance at all. And after about fifteen paces, maybe a quarter of the way to the elevator, Blake faded out absentmindedly mid-sentence, and I took up the conversation, finishing up with a “Right? Right, Blake?” He didn’t answer. I eventually looked behind me to find him half a corridor away, standing propped on his rollie, staring at the wall, in tears.
“Blake? Blake? What’s wrong?”
He awoke as if from a trance.
“Nothing,” he said, surprised to find himself crying.
“Nothing?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said again, and shook his head, as if to shake away the tears. “Really. I don’t know what happened. Just, nothing.”
“Everything?” I asked, encouraging him towards the elevator, wondering whether it might be better to go back to the room.
“No,” he laughed. “Nothing. C’mon, let’s go.”
Heaven thought Hell was out of control. Hell thought Heaven holier-than-thou. News of the pristine blender and the proffered smoothie was further evidence of sanctimoniousness.
Jack hung a doctored dartboard on the inside door of the toilet; he’d assigned a quadrant of the board to each member of the school bus, just like the one Blake had seen at school. With the door open, he could play darts pretty successfully without putting anyone’s eye out.
“It’s mean,” said Mitchell. “Take it down. Or put my name on there as well.”
“It’s only a bit of fun,” said Jack.
“Oh let him play darts. Can you get me a pig’s head?” asked Blake.
“No, I cannot get you a pig’s head.”
“I thought you said if I asked you for something then you’d make sure I got it.”
“I did say that, Blake, but I then said, very quietly, under my breath, ‘unless it’s a pig head.’ Because that’s where I draw the line.”
Blake and Jack were asking Mitchell to take sides, and this he could not do. Every now and then, they’d ask me to swing a vote this way or that, but Mitchell wouldn’t be drawn. At one point there was a “clear the air” band meeting. Blake showed up wearing comically aggressive war paint.
“What do you think?” he said. Camille tutted. “Thought I might put it on for the show. Also, Mitchell, we should have face painting at the gigs. Kids love face painting.” It was a great idea.
“My children,” said Mitchell. “You need some guidance from the adult world. I am from that world. Let me be your guide.” Blake only wanted to talk about further plans for the show, and Camille and Curtis kept their counsel. It never devolved into a slanging match; better if it had. Such meetings only polluted the air further. Blake and Jack were getting a kick out of the tension: they were the bad boys, onstage and off. Back on the bus, Blake even went so far as to say: “I know it’s a bit awkward, but it makes for a good show. We’re still playing really well. And the kids know what they want to see.”
“Blake,” said Mitchell. “Don’t do it this way. You could just ask them to be like that onstage. They’re good. They can do it. You’re getting off on this. That’s the problem.”
“How about that hair dryer?”
“You know what, Blake? You’re losing the plot.”
“Who needs a plot?” Blake asked as he headed back and then, over his shoulder, as I knew he would: “Nonsense resists plot.”
Mitchell closed the door firmly and invited me to sit opposite him: “I’ll tell you, and you only, who needs a plot, my friend: Blake, this band, this tour. It needs a plot and it needs a structure, and I, the road manager, am the one who provides it, because without me this woul
d spin out of control. Blake can only do what he does—lovable, laughable Blake—because of the structure, because of me, and because of you: he needs us. Trouble is: he doesn’t know it.”
“No, I . . .” but I couldn’t even finish the sentence.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t try. And besides we need him too. There’s no show without the singer.”
Mitchell and I were the intermediate beings, licensed to float freely between Heaven and Hell.
The stage was a safe haven—the show was sacrosanct; to admit any more mayhem would have been suicidal—but backstage was a no-man’s-land with endless potential for practical jokes and small indignities. Most of it was harmless; all of it was childish; some of it was funny (spurious announcements delivering misinformation only to Heaven’s dressing room, that kind of thing). Heaven remained aloof. Besides, it was mostly just Blake doing what he did onstage, being Blake. In Heaven itself, the angels thought themselves safe, so it was always likely that their bus would be the scene of the worst outrage.
“Curtis seemed to be enjoying his smoothie tonight,” Jack remarked out of nowhere, flicking absentmindedly through a catalog of guitar cables. The smoothie had become symbolic of all that was precious about Heaven. Mitchell had recently stepped off our bus, so Hell could talk freely. The voice of reason had come to be associated with the forces of good purely because he refused to align himself with “us”: he had to be doubly fair, doubly annoying.
“Yeah, it was kind of a luminous green. Looked a bit spooky,” I said. “Full of vitamins.”
“Spirulina, probably,” said Blake pointedly.
“Wheatgrass.”
“Bee pollen.” Blake over-enunciated every syllable.
“And pee,” said Jack.
“Pee pollen?” asked Blake, interest piqued. “Don’t tell me he’s fucking drinking his own pee. My friend had a boyfriend who used to. Didn’t Roger Daltrey? Anyway, don’t tell me Curtis’s drinking his own pee.”
“Much better than that,” Jack said. “He’s drinking mine.”
Silence. Blake started to giggle: “No, no, no, no, no.”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I was caught a bit short and someone was in the toilet, so I nipped on their bus, and the blender was right there with this green concoction in it and . . .”
“Need you say more?” asked Blake. They were two brothers in the playground.
“I needn’t, but I could.”
“Guys,” I said. “That is debased.” They looked at me, giggling. “You pissed in a man’s smoothie, Jack. They’re drinking your urine.” They couldn’t stop laughing.
“I’m going to get a big conch,” said Blake, apropos of nothing it seemed to me.
“Nasty!” said Jack.
“Blow it at the beginning of the show . . .”
“And then smash it at the end!”
I looked at them nonplussed.
“Lord of the Flies,” they said at the same moment.
I should have told Mitchell.
13
“The brown acid that is circulating around us is not specifically too good.”
THE SMOOTHIE WAS THE ABSOLUTE NADIR, BUT ONLY THE THREE OF us knew about it. Thus, the official nadir was not the urine (which, had anyone else known, would have led to the band’s immediate demise) but the gun.“Mitchell,” Blake had asked at some point. “Can you pick me up a vaguely realistic toy gun? Second thought, it doesn’t have to be that realistic.”
“No one will stand for a gun onstage,” said Mitchell.
“Of course not. Just for me.”
That forgotten, and after enough time had elapsed to serve his purposes, Blake made an unexpected cameo in the other dressing room. He was in a bad mood. MOMs had started picketing the gigs—I still have some of the pamphlets—and a guy, not realizing who Blake was, had tried to force some propaganda on him as he went backstage from the bus. There had been a minor scuffle.
“Hey, Mitch,” asked Blake, “do you have that fake gun?”
“Yes, hold on. I was wondering when you’d ask. A couple of options . . .” He delved inside a plastic bag with a big red logo.
“I don’t want toy guns around Aslan,” said Camille.
“Oh,” said Blake. “It’s just a silly thing.”
From the bag, Mitchell pulled out a gun. But it was not a toy gun. It was his gun; his real gun. He looked at it, initially horrified, then guilty, like Cary Grant at the UN in North by Northwest. Immediately, Blake took unnecessary control of a nonexistent hostage crisis: “Mitchell, now calm down! Take it easy, man! Think of the children!”
Without a word, Mitchell placed the gun down, barrel carefully pointed at the wall, dialed the combination on his case, opened it, removing the toy gun Blake had somehow snuck inside, which he pocketed, put the real gun back in its rightful place, and locked the case again: “Blake, in the bus now.”
“Just a bit of fun,” said Blake, daring anyone else to laugh, adding in mitigation: “It didn’t go off.” I calculated the lengths Blake had gone to: learning the combination, substituting the guns, patiently waiting for the perfect moment. It was an impressive amount of work for a bizarre payoff.
“IN THE BUS!” shouted Mitchell, face red, veins bulging up his neck. It was the only time I ever heard him shout.
“Unbelievable,” said Curtis, after they left, Mitchell’s anger still echoing around the room. “Unbelievable.”
“Is everything okay?” Camille asked me, genuinely concerned.
“Yes,” I said, thinking of the urine they’d been drinking, the dartboard, Camille’s horror at the very possibility of a toy gun.
“Was that a real gun?” asked Aslan with reverence.
“No,” said Camille, at the exact moment Mei-Xing said “Yes.”
Nobody moved. I sat.
“Are you worried about him?” asked Curtis. “Seriously.”
I mean, I was worried about him, but, curiously, I wasn’t worried about the gun gag. Could it be that the whole prank was revenge for the hair dryer? It was harmless enough. No one was “waving a gun around,” whatever they said later.
“A little, I guess.”
“Do you want to come and hang out on our bus more often? Travel with us?”
“We can play Monopoly,” said Mei-Xing with a kind of smile.
It actually sounded appealing: Monopoly and a smoothie. Of course, I’d blend it myself.
Though Mei-Xing and I, victims of backstage apartheid, rarely spoke, she hovered near the booth, and I got the feeling that, despite the differences between our buses, she wanted to hang out. Besides, if there was mayhem on the floor, the booth was a sanctuary. Curtis knew she was there and she’d wave. I’d wave back. We all waved.
Once in DC, the second of a two-afternoon-stand, she unexpectedly asked if I’d take her to a disco, a pre-birthday treat. She was a little dressier than usual, wearing a noticeably shorter skirt than Curtis generally allowed.
“Should we ask Curtis?”
“He told me about a place,” she said. “He’ll arrange for us so we get in.”
Backstage, I felt like I was being set up, introduced to my girlfriend’s father for the first time.
“So, Sweet, are you up to the job?” asked Curtis. Maybe this was part of my indoctrination into their happy cult, a strategy to save my soul.
“Well, I hope so, sir,” I said. Mei-Xing laughed. “Wouldn’t you rather take her yourself?”
“No, no; she doesn’t need old Curtis hanging around her the whole time, do you, little miss?”
“Well,” I said. “I’ll do the best I can, to, you know, chaperone.”
He scribbled an address. “It’s a teenage disco, no alcohol. I know you’re not interested in that stuff anyway.”
“Is it . . . churchy?” I asked, fearing the absolute worst.
“No, no,” he said, surreptitiously slipping five $20s into my hand. “It starts at five. Cabs everywhere. Go get a burger. Then straight back to the hotel. No later than
nine.”
A disco wasn’t my preferred evening off—a bit of a busman’s holiday—but it had got to the point where I could do without the sometimes tense atmosphere, and if Mei-Xing needed an accomplice, I was happy to be one. We barely spoke in the cab, but after what appeared lengthy private debate, she said: “You can pretend to be my boyfriend, right? No one will bother me that way. We’ll just dance.”
We gave our names at the door—some kind of VIP deal. The doorman seemed listless, spared even the checking of IDs, the bouncers likewise in the grip of mild existential crisis. There may have been no alcohol—though little huddles of teenagers were scattered about the club, up to no good—but everything else was a perfect facsimile of the real thing: the smell, the bodies, the pounding bass of “Shiny Happy People” vibrating through the dance floor, the themed rooms. Mei-Xing chose which mirror-ball to dance beneath. I’ve never been much of a mover, so I was content to stand back and watch this mysterious almost-fifteen-year-old, lost in music, but she finally roped me in with that invisible lasso mime native to all of the world’s dance floors. She was making fun of an adjacent group who demonstrated all the old favorites without irony: the nose-dive snorkel, the two-finger cats-eye, the iconic Saturday Night Fever teapot.
At one moment, eyes closed, she rubbed her leg—actually, the bit between her legs—up and down my knee. I was an innocent bystander, a prop, but I wondered whether, as her “boyfriend,” I shouldn’t evince a bit more enthusiasm. The other boys were very aware of her. What she really wanted was a bodyguard. I am no one’s ideal bodyguard.
“Dance like nobody’s watching,” she shouted over the music. Conversation was, happily, impossible.
“I’ll go and get a drink,” I yelled, accompanying it with a Greg-ish mime.
“Okay. Coke,” she said. At least she had good taste.
Holding both our cokes, I watched from the side of the room. She was oblivious, surrounded now by a throbbing group of teens. A kid approached me, fifteen, dressed like this was the big night of his life.