Jake the Fake Keeps It Real

by Craig Robinson

  Snake: ’Tis a foul taste, this infernal gum! Like gasoline mixed with the snot o’ landlubbers!

  Devin: Mixed with the farts of a quarter horse! But I can’t spit it out! My jaw just keeps goin’! It’s a-drivin’ this poor old cowpoke insane!

  Snake: Yar! This old buccaneer as well! Make it stop! I’m hearin’ fiddles and seein’ ghosts of scoundrels what plunged down to a watery grave many a moon ago!

  The ghosts of dead pirates appear onstage and start dancing around to fiddle music.

  Devin: I’m seein’ the specter of my dear old horse Quicksilver and hearin’ a most appallin’ tune played on some infernal bagpipe!

  The ghost of Quicksilver joins the ghosts of the pirates, and a bagpipe starts playing.

  Snake: We been poisoned! A million plagues on whoever has committed this foul deed! When I find out what scalawag is responsible, I’ll—

  Just then, Snake PROJECTILE VOMITS, spraying the first eight rows of the audience with PARTIALLY DIGESTED BOLOGNA SANDWICHES AND CHOCOLATE YOO-HOO.

  Devin sees it and runs over to help. But he slips on the MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF PUKE and falls onto his back. Then he also starts PROJECTILE VOMITING STRAIGHT UP INTO THE AIR LIKE A FOUNTAIN.

  Devin and Snake continue to vomit for the NEXT TEN MINUTES, until the entire stage and most of the audience are COMPLETELY DRENCHED IN PUKE.

  Finally, they stop puking and pass out.

  Grzplybzzk and Fred stare at them.

  Grzplybzzk: Well. That was unexpected.

  Grzplybzzk walks up to the counter and places a Big Gulp, two Slim Jims, six hot dogs, and a giant bag of Chili Cheese Fritos on the counter.

  Guy Behind the Counter: Will that be all?

  Grzplybzzk: No. I’ll also take two lottery tickets…and TOTAL CONTROL OF PLANET EARTH! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

  Curtain.

  The End.

  Grzplybzzk comes out from behind the curtain to taunt the vomit-covered audience some more.

  Grzplybzzk: HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.

  Eventually he goes away.

  The End, for real this time.

  At a regular school, if they are going to take you on a field trip, they announce it about three months ahead of time, and you have to get a permission slip signed by one of your parents, and there are chaperones and buses, and it’s a Big Deal.

  At Music and Art Academy, it doesn’t work that way. Today, when we got to homeroom, Mr. Allen announced that since the end of the semester was only a week away, he was taking us on a “vision quest” to Springfield Mall so we could find our “heart-song consumer items” and also “meditate on our final projects.” Then he introduced us to a friend of his named Stan the Man with the Van and the Plan, who had volunteered to drive us.

  Whitman raised his hand, which was kind of shocking since he barely ever spoke.

  “Yes?” said Mr. Allen.

  “What was your name before you got the van?” Whitman wanted to know.

  “Stan the Man with a Plan to Get a Van,” said Stan the Man with the Van and the Plan.

  “So you always knew you wanted a van?” asked Whitman.

  Stan the Man with the Van and the Plan nodded really fast. “Absolutely,” he said. “Since birth.”

  Whitman looked like he was thinking hard.

  “And what’s your plan now?” he asked.

  “To get another van,” said Stan the Man with the Van and the Plan.

  Whitman’s eyes got wide. “I think I want a van,” he said. And then he bolted out of his chair and gave Stan the Man with the Van and the Plan a giant hug, which I don’t think any of us saw coming.

  I was a little skeptical that just walking around a mall was going to help me solve the problem of a final project, and I also didn’t know what a “heart-song consumer item” was. But it was worth a try.

  Forrest had never been to a mall before, so Azure and I decided we ought to keep a close eye on him. And sure enough, he was a hot mess.

  If you’ve ever seen a bird fly into a house by mistake and get all confused and panicky and start just slamming into windows over and over, you’ve got a pretty good idea of Forrest in the mall. First he wandered into a Foot Locker and just stood there trembling and saying “So many shoes, so many shoes” over and over.

  Then one of the employees came over and said, “Can I help you?” and Forrest grabbed his arm and said, “Help me! Help me!” and that was when Azure and I basically dragged him out of there.

  After an hour, he’d calmed down enough that we could wander the big open spaces of the mall, and maybe go into a store for a few minutes at a time in search of our heart-song consumer items, which according to Mr. Allen were basically objects that we felt drawn to for some reason, or no reason. My guess was that we were going to paint them later or something. We were not supposed to buy them, which wasn’t a problem since none of us had any money anyway.

  “What are you guys doing for your final project?” I asked as the three of us strolled through the home furnishings section of the big Macy’s store.

  Azure shrugged. “I haven’t totally decided, but I’ll probably play some excerpts from this symphony I wrote.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “You wrote a symphony?”

  “Yeah, dude. There’s a modern dance routine that goes with it, too, but I’m not sure if I can do all the moves while playing my keytar. I gotta practice a little more.”

  “You’re a freak,” I told her, and turned to Forrest. “What about you, Huckleberry?”

  Forrest cleared his throat and blinked several times. “I will be presenting a fourteen-foot-by-fourteen-foot collage of pinecones and animal scat,” he said.

  As far as I knew, scat was a kind of jazz singing without words. Which didn’t make much sense to me, but I figured if anybody could get squirrels or dogs or bears to sing, it was this guy.

  “How do you get them to scat?” I asked.

  He looked puzzled. “They just do it,” he said.

  “You mean you didn’t train them?”

  “To scat? Of course not. They do it naturally. I just picked it up and shellacked it so it wouldn’t smell.”

  That was when Azure squeezed my hand and said, “Uh, Jake, scat means poop.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That…makes more sense, I guess.”

  “What’s your final project?” Azure asked me.

  “I’m still trying to make up my mind,” I said. “I’m kind of nervous about it, to be honest.”

  Azure rolled her eyes. “Oh, please. You’re, like, the most talented person I know.”

  I was so shocked to hear her say that, I felt like I’d been karate-chopped in the throat. Was she just trying to be nice? Had she not been paying attention? Here we were surrounded by state-champion crocheters and award-winning oboe players, not to mention that Azure herself had just written a symphony, and here she was calling me talented?

  By the time I got myself together enough to answer, we had turned the corner from home furnishings into women’s wear.

  “Talented at what?” I said.

  Azure rolled her eyes again. “Now you’re just fishing for compliments.”

  I shook my head. “No, seriously—if there’s something I’m actually good at, please tell me. I’m begging you.”

  Azure stopped walking and turned to look me in the eye.

  “Well,” she said, “for one thing, you’re super funny. You crack me up all the time.”

  My heart sank a little bit. “That’s not a talent,” I said. “That’s just me goofing off. A talent is, like, making something.”

  Azure frowned at me. “Listen here, The Dentist,” she began, but then a strange, loud moaning sound interrupted her.

  We both pricked up our ears, trying to figure out where it was coming from and who or what was making it, and then at the same time we both said, “Where’s Forrest?”

  The answer was: around the corner
, with his eyes closed, rubbing a pink cardigan sweater against his cheek and making a noise like a cat who is about to throw up a medium piece of Lego. Except he didn’t seem to be in pain. He seemed to be in the opposite of pain.

  “Hey there, Huckleberry,” Azure said. “What are you doing?”

  Forrest opened his eyes and closed his mouth, and suddenly we could hear the terrible music being piped through the store’s sound system again.

  “I found it,” he said. “My heart-song consumer item.”

  “It’s nice,” I said. “Very fuzzy. Kind of surprising that it’s a woman’s sweater, but…”

  “The heart wants what the heart wants,” Forrest said into the sweater.

  “Fifty percent off, too,” Azure added, reading the price tag. “I’d wear this. I’d probably cut the arms off and maybe spice it up with some black electrical tape, but I’d totally wear this.”

  “I love it,” Forrest whispered. “We’re connected.”

  “Must be nice,” I said, looking around the store. Forrest seemed so peaceful that I was suddenly very eager to find my own heart-song consumer item. But I knew it wasn’t something you could fake.

  When the big day finally arrived, I had nothing.

  Well, that’s not entirely true. I had a headache, and a stomachache, and an earache. As a matter of fact, everything hurt, including my hair and toenails.

  What I didn’t have was a plan. A talent to show. A project to finalize.

  So here I was backstage, waiting my turn with the rest of the sixth graders, preparing to fake my butt off. The way I figured it, there was about a fifty percent chance this would be my last day at Music and Art Academy, so I might as well spend it the way I’d spent so many others: clueless and freaked-out and wearing something ridiculous—in this case, a way-too-big Shell Oil gas-station attendant jumpsuit that my dad had used as a Halloween costume last year. I was sporting it in the hopes that it would distract everybody from the fact that I was playing the exact same song I’d auditioned with last year, and keep them from throwing rocks at me. I don’t know why they’d bring rocks to a talent show, but better safe than sorry.

  There was also the chance that I might throw up at the sound of myself playing “Song for My Father.” Which I actually hoped would happen, because maybe throwing up while playing could be viewed as some kind of performance art.

  The way the talent show worked was that each grade took a turn, and each kid got five minutes. It lasted all day. The other grades were out there in the audience right now, along with parents and teachers and trustees and maybe random bozos off the street who’d happened to wander in. The auditorium was packed. There must have been twelve billion people there, give or take.

  I was going last out of all the sixth graders, but I guess I must have spaced out, because I don’t remember anybody else’s performance. Just a huge tidal wave of applause, and then Azure skipping backstage and kissing me on the cheek, and Mr. Allen saying, “Great job, Azure,” and then beckoning to me and saying, “Okay, The Dentist, bring it on home.”

  And then, somehow, I was walking across the stage, in my ginormous Shell Oil jumpsuit, and sitting down at the piano bench.

  I remember staring down at the keys and thinking that they looked kind of like black-and-white popsicles. And then I remember thinking that was a really stupid thing to think—they didn’t look anything like popsicles.

  Then somebody in the audience coughed, and I realized I’d been sitting there for at least thirty seconds, not even moving. So I picked my hands up off my lap, took a deep breath, and prepared to play the opening notes of “Song for My Father.”

  But I couldn’t remember what they were. My entire mind was a blank. But not a blank, exactly. More like a bottle of soda that’s been shaken up and opened and is fizzing and bubbling and frothing. My brain was trying to escape my body and run off to go work on a fishing boat in Alaska.

  The keys didn’t look like popsicles anymore. They looked like a foreign alphabet I couldn’t make any sense of at all.

  I looked up from them and into the blinding stage lights. I couldn’t see anyone, but I knew there were thousands of disappointed people out there, including my parents.

  For some reason, or maybe for no reason, I stood up. And then I heard myself say, “You guys ever notice how piano keys don’t look anything like popsicles?”

  For a second, there was total silence, as if my words had been sucked into a black hole. My mouth felt sour, like I’d just woken up from a long nap.

  And then a wave of noise rolled back out of the black hole and nearly knocked me off my feet.

  For an instant, I was confused. What was happening? Then I figured it out.

  They were laughing.

  They thought I was funny.

  I flashed back to what Azure had said to me in the mall: You’re, like, the most talented person I know. You’re super funny. You crack me up all the time.

  And when the laughter trailed off, I just kept talking.

  “Then again,” I said, stepping out from behind the piano and walking toward the middle of the stage, “this is Music and Art Academy, right? I could probably make a piano out of popsicles, or a popsicle out of pianos, and get an A for it. Except not an A, because there’s no such thing here. More like a teal weasel. Or maybe a light gray Velociraptor.”

  The words were just pouring out of me now, like some kind of river that had been undammed. I paused to take a breath and realized that the laughter was still going strong.

  “Heck,” I said, “I could probably just make a popsicle out of a popsicle and that would fly. Because here’s the secret: if everybody thinks you’re talented, you don’t have to be talented. I mean, look at me. What am I good at?”

  I paused, to let them wonder and let the tension build. It was just an instinct, but I could feel the room waiting for my answer. I had them in the palm of my hand. It was a great feeling. My heart was hammering inside my chest, with nervousness but also something like joy.

  It took me a second to realize that I had to actually come up with an answer.

  “Well,” I said, scratching my head, “not answering questions, obviously.”

  Bam! Laughter! The sound felt like it was filling me up, nourishing me. I glanced sideways, into the wings, and saw Mr. Allen grinning from ear to ear. Azure was next to him. She was jumping up and down.

  “Everything is different here,” I went on. “At my old school, lunch was, like, hamburgers made out of terminally ill circus animals, and maybe a warm glass of sewer water. Here, the burgers are made of cows with genius-level IQs who ate nothing but special Japanese seaweed that’s been blessed by monks. I swear, half my class is really restaurant critics in disguise, just so they can chow down on some pasture-fed granola or whatever.”

  The crowd was roaring now. And I’d found a theme. Shoot, I could make fun of M&AA all day.

  I paced closer to the front of the stage, so light on my feet I was practically levitating. “At my old school, if you did something bad, you got sent to the principal’s office. Here, I could walk into the principal’s office right now, dump a forty-pound bag of garbage onto the floor, and start rolling around in it while yodeling at the top my lungs, and you know what would happen?”

  I paused, expecting silence again, but they were already laughing—like they were so sure the answer would be funny that they’d decided to get a head start. So I kept waiting. When it finally died down, I jerked my thumb toward the back of the stage.

  “Ask Mr. Allen,” I said. “That’s how he got his job.”

  That’s when the place EXPLODED.

  But not in flames. In HILARITY.

  I don’t even remember the rest of what I said. For that matter, I don’t remember walking offstage, either, though I guess I must have, since I’m not still there. What I do remember is getting mobbed backstage by Azure and Forrest and Zenobia and Bin-Bin and Klaus and Whitman and Cody and Mr. Allen, like I’d just won the Super Bowl or something.<
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  My head was spinning. I barely understood what had just happened. But I knew one thing.

  I’d walked onstage a fake.

  I’d walked off a comedian.

  My parents were in the audience, all right. When the show finally ended and the lights came up, they made a beeline for me. Both of them were grinning ear to ear.

  “Sweetheart! That was wonderful!” my mother said, swooping in for a hug. When her mouth was next to my ear, she whispered, “I almost peed in my pants,” then straightened up and winked like that was our little secret. She’s pretty cool sometimes, my mom.

  My dad gave me a big tight hug, too, and said, “I loved the fake-out with the piano. How’d you think of that?”

  I didn’t have a clue how to answer, but luckily, before I had to, my mom said, “How long have you been working on that routine? I had no idea! I mean, I always knew you were funny, but…Oh! There she is!”

  I breathed a sigh of relief and turned to see Lisa strutting up the aisle. She’d pretty much brought down the house and also nearly busted all the windows with some aria from a famous opera, and she looked all glowy and invigorated, and soon my parents were hugging her, and the questions of how their son had decided to become a comedian had been forgotten.

  “Who wants ice cream?” my father asked, putting one arm around my shoulders and the other around Lisa’s.